Looking around in distress: Judgmental and attentional biases in multievidence decision making revealed in anxiety.

Abstract

Threat-related biases are core to anxiety. Different cognitive models coexist, with some emphasizing threat avoidance and others focusing on threat maintenance. Previous experimental research has mainly targeted how individuals perceive a single emotional stimulus, but in daily life, people often integrate emotional evidence from various sources to make a summary conclusion. Little is known about how anxiety and anxious apprehension (AP), a key symptom dimension, impact processing of such emotion ensembles. This study investigated threat-related judgmental and attentional biases in emotion ensemble decisions in anxiety. Adult participants with current anxiety disorders (N = 51) and controls (N = 61) took part in an emotion ensemble judgment task, where they decided whether the ensemble, consisting of emotional faces ranging from fearful to happy, was on average more fearful or happier. Eye movements were tracked to measure visual attention allocation, and AP was measured using the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. The anxiety group made more fearful judgments than the control group, and this judgmental bias was related to AP. Eye-tracking results revealed that the anxiety group paid more overt attention to happy stimuli than fearful stimuli, demonstrating fear avoidance. Finally, fear avoidance was associated with a higher proportion of fearful judgment. This study disclosed how individuals with anxiety assess multiple emotional evidence pieces to form a judgment, indicating overt avoidance of threatening evidence but higher weighing of such evidence in subsequent decisions. These findings support the threat-avoidance model in emotion ensemble judgments and the importance of reducing the saliency of threatening evidence during intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).