Time course of attentional bias for threat scenes: Testing the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis

The study tested the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, which proposes that anxiety-related attentional biases vary over time (i.e., initial vigilance for high threat cues, followed by avoidance). To investigate this, pictorial stimuli, which included scenes of injury, violence, and death, were presented in a visual probe task for two exposure durations: 500 ms and 1500 ms. Results showed that, in comparison with low trait anxious participants, high trait anxious individuals were more vigilant for high threat scenes at the shorter exposure duration (500 ms), and showed no attentional bias at the longer duration. However, the results also indicated significant avoidance of high threat scenes at the longer exposure duration in participants with high levels of blood-injury fear. These findings are discussed in relation to recent research indicating that anxiety and fear may reflect two distinct aversive motivational systems, which may be characterised by different patterns of cognitive bias.