Experimental studies have yielded discrepant results regarding the relationship between anxiety and attention bias to threat. Cognitive factors modulating the presence of threat-related attention bias in anxiety have drawn growing attention. Previous research demonstrated that visual working memory (WM) representations can guide attention allocation in a top-down manner. Whether threat-related WM representations affected the presence of attention bias in anxiety awaits examination. Combining a memory task and a dot-probe task, this study investigated how WM representations of faces with neutral or negative expressions modulated the attention bias to threat among highly anxious individuals versus controls. Results showed that highly anxious individuals developed more pronounced attention bias to threat when maintaining WM representations of negative faces as compared to the control group. There were no significant between-group effects when the WM representations were neutral. These results suggested that highly anxious individuals were more susceptible to the influence of mental representations with negative valence on attention deployment.

关于焦虑与威胁注意力偏向之间关系的实验研究得出了不同的结果。调节焦虑中与威胁相关的注意力偏差的认知因素已引起越来越多的关注。先前的研究表明，视觉工作记忆（WM）表示可以以自上而下的方式指导注意力分配。与威胁相关的WM表示是否影响焦虑中注意偏见的存在，尚待检查。这项研究结合了记忆任务和点探针任务，研究了具有中性或负面表情的面孔的WM表示如何调节高度焦虑的个体与对照组之间对威胁的注意力偏向。结果表明，与对照组相比，高度焦虑的人在保持负面面孔的WM表示时对威胁的注意力倾向更加明显。当WM表示为中性时，没有显着的组间影响。这些结果表明，高度焦虑的人更容易受到具有负价的心理表征对注意力部署的影响。