Abstract
Emotions consistently interact with our attention, and anxiety can influence the nature of those interactions. Anxiety can be expressed in terms of anxious apprehension, or worry, versus anxious arousal, or the physiological symptoms of anxiety. We examined the effects of anxious apprehension and anxious arousal on attention to pain stimuli when the pain information was either relevant or irrelevant to the task. Attention was assessed via reaction times to the stimuli and changes in event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded from a 64-channel high-density electroencephalography (EEG) montage. Participants (n = 46) were shown images containing one or two hands that either indicated pain (e.g., a knife blade making contact with a finger) or did not indicate pain (e.g., a knife blade away from the hands.) Participants were asked to either indicate the number of hands present in the image or if pain was present in the image. Participants responded significantly faster to no-pain stimuli when indicating the number of hands (M = 671.82, SE = 13.63) and to pain stimuli when indicating the presence of pain (M = 861.67 ms, SE =16.54). A significant stimulus by task by anxious apprehension interaction was found. Follow up analyses revealed trend-level correlations between anxious apprehension level and P1 amplitude, such that as anxious apprehension increased P1 amplitudes increased for no-pain stimuli in the counting task and pain stimuli in the pain task. These findings indicate that increases in anxious apprehension may enhance attention to the features of stimuli that are relevant to the task..