Attentional Bias in State and Trait Anxiety: A Dot-Probe Study

There is strong evidence that high anxious individuals selectively attend to threatening information. But the results of attentional bias in trait and state anxiety is inconsistent in this filed.In this article, the authors were aimed to investigate the attentional bias in state and trait anxiety. In a causal- comparative research, 120 male and female students were selected randomly from Ferdowsi University. Instruments involving, State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and Dot- Probe Test, were administered on the participants. The data of 76 (76/1% female) participants which determined as high and low trait and state anxious individuals were analyzed. The results of ANCOVA analysis showed that main effect of trait anxiety was significant (F(1,75)=8.174, p≤0.01,d=0.68), But there is no significant interaction between trait and state anxiety in interference scores in Dot-probe test. High trait anxious individuals selectively has Oriented Attention toward the threatening information. Attentional bias toward to threatening sources is correlated threatening information that is the component of hypervigilance in these persons.