Overcoming Attention Biases 53
house because you think you remember seeing a dog there.
In this instance, your anxiety is disproportionate to the situ-
ation that elicited your anxiety and is likely harmful to your
daily functioning or your overall well- being because it’s
often unwarranted.
Attentional Bias Toward Threat
To facilitate survival, humans have evolved to swiftly
respond to threatening stimuli. We even prioritize our atten-
tion to threatening stimuli, giving it rapid and dedicated
processing in various key parts of our brain. If you were to
encounter a bear in the street, your brain would prioritize
the bear’s presence, which would allow you to act swiftly
(and appropriately) to avoid being attacked. Your anxiety
would be both warranted and helpful in this situation, but
only because you chose to pay attention to the bear and your
anxious feelings. If you experience problematic or maladap-
tive anxiety, however, you tend to feel and act as if you are
constantly in the presence of a bear (or could be in the pres-
ence of a bear at any time), with a more generalized, chronic,
and pervasive sense of threat.
To illustrate this effect, research psychologists have con-
ducted scientific experiments to better understand how
attention causes changes in anxiety. Specifically, researchers
measured both the speed and the rate of detection of threat-
ening stimuli among anxious versus nonanxious people.
One such experiment required participants to scan a number
of faces in photographs to detect the “odd man out.” There
was one angry face among eleven happy faces, for example.
Findings from these studies demonstrated that people char-
acterized as highly anxious were faster at detecting the angry