It's All in the Anticipation: How Perception of Threat Is Enhanced in Anxiety

The importance of top-down factors such as goals and expectations is well-established in both visual perception and anxiety. However, researchers have attributed the perceptual prioritization of threatening stimuli in anxiety to bottom-up, automatic processing of these stimuli while neglecting the role of prestimulus, top-down factors. Furthermore, different kinds of anxiety (dispositional versus induced) impact cognitive functions differently, suggesting that top-down factors may have distinct effects on threat perception. In the present study, we examined whether prestimulus representations of threatening stimuli facilitate perception differently, depending on induced and trait anxiety. Two groups of participants completed a cued discrimination task using threatening or neutral cues to identify subsequently presented fearful and neutral faces, degraded to each participant's perceptual threshold. In Group 1, threat of shock induced anxiety (n = 22; 12 men), whereas in Group 2, no anxiety was induced (n = 29; 7 men). The impact of induced anxiety on perception interacted with trait anxiety. Following fear cues, higher trait anxiety was associated with improved perceptual sensitivity and faster reaction time under threat of shock, and worse perceptual sensitivity and slower reaction time in absence of shock. The present findings represent an important advance in the literature because they elucidate the role of previously ignored top-down factors in threat perception for individuals with varying levels of anxiety and highlight the distinct impact that different types of anxiety have on the perception of threatening stimuli. Furthermore, these findings underline the importance of including top-down factors in future conceptualizations of perceptual bias toward threat in anxiety.