Neurophysiological mechanisms in the emotional modulation of attention: The interplay between threat sensitivity and attentional control

Processing task-irrelevant emotional information may compromise attention performance, particularly among those showing elevated threat sensitivity. If threat-sensitive individuals are able to recruit attentional control to inhibit emotional processing, however, they may show few decrements in attention performance. To examine this hypothesis, attention performance was measured in three domains—alerting, orienting, and executive attention. Task-irrelevant fearful, sad, and happy faces were presented for 50 ms before each trial of the attention task to create a mildly competitive emotional context. Electroencephalographic recordings were made from 64 scalp electrodes to generate event-related potentials (ERPs) to the faces. Participants reporting high threat sensitivity showed enhanced ERPs thought to reflect emotional processing (P200) and attentional control (P100 and N200). Enhanced N200 following fearful faces was linked to sustained and even slightly improved executive attention performance (reduced conflict interference) among high threat-sensitive individuals, but with decrements in executive attention among low threat-sensitive individuals. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive processing efficiency and the balance between threat sensitivity and attentional control in relation to executive attention performance. Results may have implications for understanding automatic and voluntary attentional biases related to anxiety.