When emotions cannot be efficiently used to guide attention: Flexible, goal-relevant utilization of facial emotions...

In order to achieve optimal outcomes in diverse situations, emotional information can be used to initiate novel, goal-directed processes that are not inherently related to the emotional meaning. Demonstrating this goal-dependent flexibility, in a recent study, we presented facial emotions as informative spatial cues: Participants could direct their attention to the probable target location based on the expressed emotion with a remarkable efficiency (Folyi, Rohr, & Wentura, 2020). However, as inherent motivational aspects of threat-related facial expressions can be particularly salient to socially anxious individuals (e.g., Staugaard, 2010), they might not be able to use this information flexibly in the pursuit of a context-specific goal. The present study tested this assumption in an endogenous cueing task with anger and fear expressions as informative central cues. Indeed, in Experiment 1 (N = 174), higher social anxiety was associated with reduced cueing at a 600 ms cue-target asynchrony, and this deficit was specific to social as opposed to general anxiety. Furthermore, this effect occurred only when faces were presented upright (Experiment 1), and not under inverted presentation (Experiment 2, N = 90), ruling out a general deficit in attentional control. The results suggest that flexible utilization of threat-related emotional information is sensitive to participants' social anxiety, suggesting an imbalance between using emotional information in the pursuit of a context-dependent goal on the one hand, and processes intrinsically related to the emotional meaning on the other.