State Anxiety Modulates Conflict Control Depending on Cognitive Control Context: Evidence From Behavioral and ERP Data.

The impact of state anxiety on conflict control and its neural mechanisms, particularly in relation to proactive versus reactive control, remains incompletely understood. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to investigate how state anxiety affects conflict control across different control contexts and to explore the associated temporal dynamics. The threat of shock paradigm was employed to induce state anxiety.

The role of state anxiety in salience-driven distractor processing: evidence from singleton detection and feature search.

Salient but irrelevant distractors automatically capture attention in singleton detection search but not in feature search, due to the different search strategies adopt by observers. While state anxiety has been associated with increased salience-driven capture, it remains unclear whether such effects extend to feature search, which relies more on top-down control. The present study addressed this question using an eye-tracking technique, combining the threat of shock with the singleton detection and feature search tasks.