Happy and angry faces: Subclinical levels of anxiety are differentially related to attentional biases in men and women

Sensitivity towards threat is a robust finding in anxious individuals. The dot probe task is one of the most commonly used experimental paradigms to study attentional biases in anxiety. However, previous research relied mostly on extreme group comparisons, suffered from small sample size and sex imbalance, and did not investigate sex differences or attentional biases toward facial emotional expressions other than anger and happiness. We present data of a large community sample showing that high-anxious women exhibit an expected attentional bias towards angry faces, whereas high-anxious men exhibit a bias towards happy faces. We discuss our findings with regard to the generalizability of previous research and the need for further studies.