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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 25, 2026

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Measuring Attentional Biases for Threat in Children and Adults

Published on: October 19, 2014

Memory and attention for social threat: anxious hypercoding-avoidance and submissive gaze aversion.

David Terburg¹, Henk Aarts, Jack van Honk

¹Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands. d.terburg@uu.nl

Emotion (Washington, D.C.)

|February 8, 2012

Summary

Anxious individuals vigilantly scan for threats, remember their locations, and avoid them, a behavior termed hypercoding-avoidance. This study differentiates anxious gaze avoidance from submissive gaze aversion.

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Area of Science:

Psychology
Social Neuroscience
Cognitive Science

Background:

Social dominance interactions often involve eye contact, leading to distinct gaze behaviors like aversion.
Individual differences in anxiety and anger influence responses to social threats.

Purpose of the Study:

To differentiate between submissive gaze aversion and anxious gaze avoidance.
To investigate the relationship between gaze behavior, threat detection, and memory in social contexts.
To introduce and define the term 'hypercoding-avoidance' for anxiety-related threat processing.

Main Methods:

Experimental manipulation within a social-memory setting.
Assessment of gaze behavior in response to social dominance cues.
Measurement of threat detection, memory recall, and gaze aversion patterns.

Main Results:

Anxious individuals exhibit hypervigilance towards social threats (angry faces), superior memory for threat locations, and subsequent avoidance.
Submissive individuals (high trait anxiety, low trait anger) display rapid gaze aversion from angry faces.
Experimental evidence confirms submissive gaze aversion is distinct from anxious gaze avoidance.

Conclusions:

Hypervigilance-avoidance mechanisms underpin natural gaze behavior and enhanced threat memory in anxiety.
The proposed 'hypercoding-avoidance' describes the process of scanning, remembering, and avoiding social threats in anxious individuals.
This research provides novel insights into the distinct neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying different forms of gaze aversion in social interactions.