The role of motivation in delayed disengagement from threat in anxiety

The idea that highly anxious individuals have difficulty disengaging attention from threat is widely accepted, yet empirical support is limited. The term "difficulty" implies an involuntary delay in disengagement, but this has not been rigorously tested. Across three pre-registered experiments, we examined disengagement using different stimuli and protocols. Emotional and neutral images appeared at fixation, and healthy participants varying in self-reported anxiety were required to respond to a target elsewhere on the screen. Disengagement time was measured using eye-tracking (Experiment 1) and manual response times (Experiments 2 and 3). Motivation to disengage was manipulated by punishing slow responses (Exp. 1) or rewarding fast responses (Exp. 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, participants were slower to move their eyes away from a stimulus predicting punishment, regardless of anxiety level, even when delay resulted in an aversive noise. In Experiments 2 and 3, spider and snake images (but not emotional faces) slowed disengagement, but this effect was unrelated to anxiety or motivation. Disengagement bias scores showed poor reliability across all studies. These findings cast doubt on the idea that anxiety is reliably associated with impaired attentional disengagement from threat.