Emotional context influences access of visual stimuli to anxious individuals' awareness

► Subjects discriminated threat and non-threat faces from neutral objects. ► The emotional content of the targets was thus irrelevant to the task. ► We compared objective and subjective awareness thresholds in high/low trait anxiety. ► Anxious subjects had lower thresholds for all targets within a threat-related context. ► Affective context plays a prominent role in anxious individuals' conscious perception.