Attentional bias for words of concern in anxious mood

It has been reported that anxious subjects attend selectively to threat information, and especially to the threat information that is congruent with their individual concern. In this study, 15 high trait anxiety and 15 low trait anxiety subjects performed a dot-probe task. Reaction times to threat words that were congruent or incongruent with their cocern were measured in high and low state anxiety states. The results showed that high trait anxiety subjects attended to the threat words of their concern in both states, while low trait anxiety subjects only in high anxiety state