Abstract
In order to investigate whether attentional biases found in anxiety situations are a consequence of automatic processing, 2 experiments were conducted. The first experiment examined whether attentional biases are processed unconsciously. Participants (university students) with high or low social anxiety (13 in each group) were required to accomplish a dot-probe detection task in which word pairs were presented for a subliminal duration (20 ms) or a supraliminal duration (300 ms) . The results showed that when the pairs were presented subliminally, the participants did not show an attentional bias toward threat-related words. The second study used a dual-task paradigm to investigate whether attentional biases need cognitive resources. Participants (university students) with high or low trait anxiety (8 in each group) were required to accomplish the dot-probe detection task and a memory task simultaneously. The results revealed that both groups did not show attentional biases in the condition in which the memory task consumed many resources. These results suggest that attentional biases are not processed unconsciously, and that they need some resources. Thus, attentional biases may not be processed automatically.
