Imagine trying to focus on a task while a flashing red warning light blinks right in front of your eyes. Now imagine that the warning light is your mind, and the threat it’s fixated on is only a possibility, not a certainty. This is often what anxiety feels like: the brain locked in on danger, real or imagined, unable to look away.
For decades, scientists have believed that anxious individuals have a harder time disengaging their attention from threatening stimuli. The theory goes like this: when something dangerous—or even just emotionally negative—appears, anxious minds don’t just notice it faster; they also struggle to look away. This so-called “attentional bias to threat” has shaped entire branches of cognitive psychology, guided therapeutic interventions, and helped define how we understand anxiety itself.
But what if that story isn’t quite right?
Testing the Assumption That Anxiety Controls Attention
In a bold new set of experiments published in Cognition & Emotion, researchers led by Agnes Musikoyo set out to challenge a core idea in anxiety research: that the anxious brain is hardwired to cling to threat, and that this stickiness of attention is involuntary and resistant to motivation.
Their approach was both rigorous and refreshingly straightforward: instead of just observing how anxious people react to threatening stimuli, they introduced a reason to look away—either by punishing slow disengagement or by rewarding fast reactions. The question they asked was simple, yet revolutionary: If you’re anxious, but you’re also highly motivated to disengage from a threat, can you do it?
What they found has the potential to rewrite how we think about anxiety and attention—and offers a surprisingly hopeful message about the flexibility of the human mind.
Eye Movements, Aversive Sounds, and Motivation
In the first of three pre-registered experiments, 142 undergraduate students were divided into high- and low-anxiety groups based on their DASS-21 scores. Using a method borrowed from Pavlovian conditioning, participants learned to associate one colored circle (CS+) with an unpleasant noise, and another (CS–) with safety.
Then came the real test: participants had to quickly move their eyes away from whichever stimulus appeared at the center of the screen and shift focus to a target in the periphery. If they hesitated too long—particularly when the threatening CS+ was shown—they’d be hit with the aversive noise again.
The setup was elegantly cruel: linger too long on the very thing your brain is wired to fear, and you pay the price. In theory, anxious individuals should be the most paralyzed here. But they weren’t.
Across all the data, both high- and low-anxiety participants were slower to disengage from the CS+—but they were equally affected. Motivation to avoid the noise was powerful, but anxiety levels didn’t predict who struggled more. The feared “sticky attention” of anxiety wasn’t as sticky under pressure as once believed.
Angry Faces, Spiders, and the Limits of Bias
The second and third experiments took the idea even further, using larger samples (over 200 participants in each) and a broader range of stimuli. Instead of abstract shapes and sounds, researchers used emotional facial expressions (angry, fearful, neutral, happy) and evolutionarily threatening images (snakes and spiders). They also added a powerful motivational hook: money.
Half the participants were told they’d earn cash for faster responses. The others were simply told if they were correct. Then, emotional images were flashed briefly in the center of the screen before a visual search task began. If threat hijacks attention, then anxious individuals should be slower to respond when those threat images appear—especially under pressure. But again, the data told a different story.
In Experiment 2, participants showed no significant delay in disengaging from emotional faces—angry or fearful—regardless of their anxiety level. Rewards sped everyone up in general, but they didn’t amplify or reduce any threat bias. Even with the emotional weight of an angry glare, anxious minds didn’t behave as expected.
In Experiment 3, things got more interesting. Participants did show slower responses after seeing spiders or snakes—evidence that some stimuli are genuinely harder to look away from. But once again, anxiety didn’t amplify this effect. The emotional faces still didn’t hold anyone’s gaze long enough to interfere with performance, even when people were given time to process them.
A Bias That’s Not So Involuntary After All
The results across all three experiments paint a compelling picture: anxious individuals are not automatically, helplessly trapped by threatening stimuli. When motivation is high—when there’s money on the line, or when a loud noise looms—attention becomes remarkably flexible.
This stands in stark contrast to many longstanding cognitive models of anxiety, which assume that attentional disengagement from threat is largely involuntary. These models underlie widely used therapies like Attentional Bias Modification (ABM), which attempt to train people to redirect their focus away from threat. But if anxiety doesn’t actually impair disengagement in high-stakes scenarios, the entire premise of such interventions may need reevaluation.
Instead, the study suggests that context matters. Motivation, stimulus type, and task demands can all influence how much a threat grabs attention—and whether it’s hard to look away.
Rethinking the Anxious Mind
There’s a quietly radical message in these findings: the anxious brain may be more adaptable than we give it credit for. Attention isn’t just yanked around by fear—it’s also guided by goals, incentives, and context. This reframing shifts the narrative from one of helplessness to one of potential.
That’s not to say anxiety isn’t real or challenging. But it does suggest that the idea of the “hijacked” anxious mind may be an oversimplification. People with anxiety may not be doomed to stare down every perceived threat—they may simply need the right reason to look away.
One Caveat: Not All Threats Are Created Equal
While the findings are striking, the authors do offer a thoughtful caveat: not all threats carry the same weight for all people. Emotional faces, for example, may not have held deep personal meaning for participants in the way a real social conflict or fear-inducing situation might. And while snakes and spiders triggered slower responses, those effects still didn’t track with anxiety levels.
Future research may need to explore more personally relevant threats—like rejection cues for socially anxious individuals, or trauma-related images for those with PTSD—to fully understand how attention behaves under real emotional weight.
Still, the overall conclusion remains strong: attentional disengagement from threat is not a fixed deficit in anxiety. It’s flexible, context-sensitive, and shaped by motivation. And that changes everything.
Looking Ahead: A More Empowering Vision of Anxiety
In an era where anxiety is rising globally and our understanding of mental health is evolving rapidly, these findings offer something rare: a scientific insight that feels empowering.
Rather than seeing anxiety as a prison of automatic responses, we might begin to view it as a challenge of context and strategy. Attention, even in the anxious mind, can be trained—not just through repetition, but through purpose. And when the stakes are high enough, even the most fearful among us can learn to look away.
Because sometimes, all it takes to break the stare of fear is knowing that something better—something quieter, more rewarding, or more important—is waiting in the corner of your eye.
Love this? Share it and help us spark curiosity about science!