The impact of anxiety on visual attention to central and peripheral events

Recent reports in the literature suggest that anxious individuals show an attentional bias to mood-congruent information. Various investigators have hypothesized that such anxiety-based coding biases contribute to the maintenance of mood disorders. The present study sought to determine if attentional biases in anxious subjects extends to the perception of neutral, as opposed to affect-laden, stimuli. A procedure used to determine the locus of attention to foveal and peripheral visual events was used in combination with two inter-stimulus intervals, fixed and variable, to examine anxious and non-anxious subjects' attentional biases. Mood states were established by a well-validated musical induction procedure. The results revealed an attentional bias to foveal visual events in non-anxious subjects and an attenuated or reversed (peripheral) bias in anxious subjects. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.