There is widespread evidence of an attentional bias towards threat material in clinical anxiety and in non-clinical anxiety. Such findings are important because recent cognitive theories have proposed that such biases play a critical role in the etiology or maintenance of anxiety disorders. For example, Mathews suggested that attentional bias to threat cues in the environment will result in increased perception of danger, and therefore more frequent or intense experiences of anxiety.
Evidence of an attentional bias for threat in anxiety has come from a range of studies using the modified Stroop and dot probe tasks. On the Stroop task, anxious individuals are typically slower in naming the colours of threat-related words than neutral words, which is consistent with their processing resources being selectively allocated to the threat word content. In the dot probe task, pairs of stimuli are briefly presented on a screen and immediately after they disappear a small dot probe is presented in the location of one of the words.Participants are required to respond as quickly as possible to the probe. The rationale for the task is that response latencies to probes will be faster if they occur in an attended, rather than unattended, region of the display and so the deployment of attention to the face stimuli can be inferred from the RT data.