Trait anxiety refers to the stable tendency to attend to threats and experience fears and worries across many situations. According to the widely noticed, pioneering investigation by Etkin et al. (2004) trait anxiety is strongly associated with reactivity in the right basolateral amygdala to non-conscious threat. Although this observation was based on a sample of only 17 individuals, no replication effort has been reported yet. We reexamined automatic amygdala responsiveness as a function of anxiety in a large sample of 107 participants. Besides self-report instruments, we administered an indirect test to assess implicit anxiety. To assess early, automatic stages of emotion processing, we used a color-decision paradigm presenting brief (33 ms) and backward-masked fearful facial expressions. N = 56 participants were unaware of the presence of masked faces. In this subset of unaware participants, the relationship between trait anxiety and basolateral amygdala activation by fearful faces was successfully replicated in region of interest analyses. Additionally, a relation of implicit anxiety with masked fear processing in the amygdala and temporal gyrus was observed. We provide evidence that implicit measures of affect can be valuable predictors of automatic brain responsiveness and may represent useful additions to explicit measures. Our findings support a central role of amygdala reactivity to non-consciously perceived threat in understanding and predicting dispositional anxiety, i.e. the frequency of spontaneously occurring anxiety in everyday life.

特质焦虑是指在许多情况下关注威胁并经历恐惧和担忧的稳定倾向。根据 Etkin 等人广泛关注的开创性调查。 (2004) 特质焦虑与右侧基底外侧杏仁核对无意识威胁的反应密切相关。尽管这一观察结果仅基于 17 个人的样本，但尚未有重复研究的报道。我们在 107 名参与者的大样本中重新检查了杏仁核自动反应性与焦虑的关系。除了自我报告工具外，我们还进行了间接测试来评估内隐焦虑。为了评估情绪处理的早期自动阶段，我们使用了颜色决策范例来呈现简短（33 毫秒）和后向屏蔽的恐惧面部表情。 N = 56 名参与者不知道蒙面面孔的存在。在这组不知情的参与者中，特质焦虑与恐惧面孔引起的基底外侧杏仁核激活之间的关系在感兴趣区域分析中成功复制。此外，还观察到隐性焦虑与杏仁核和颞回的掩蔽恐惧处理之间的关系。我们提供的证据表明，隐性情感测量可以成为大脑自动反应的有价值的预测因素，并且可能代表对显性测量的有用补充。我们的研究结果支持杏仁核对无意识感知威胁的反应在理解和预测性格焦虑（即日常生活中自发发生焦虑的频率）方面发挥着核心作用。