ArticleCognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience2026
Anxiety facilitates disengagement when switching from negative-valenced stimuli: Mediating role of attentional control.
Article in Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
The Attentional Control Theory postulates that anxiety impairs processing efficiency (and often performance effectiveness) on tasks involving the shifting function due to deficient recruitment of attentional control resources. Furthermore, recent studies have suggested that the association between self-reported attentional control (as measured by the Attentional Control Scale; ACS) and anxiety may be driven by biased self-perceptions of one's attentional control ability. The present study investigated the relationships among anxiety (measured via the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale-Anxiety subscale), subjective attentional control (measured via the ACS), and affective task-switching performance (measured via a word-based paradigm) in 181 adults from the Max Planck Institute-Leipzig Mind-Brain-Body dataset. At the behavioral level, we found no statistically significant association between anxiety and switch-cost measures after correction for multiple comparisons. However, a pattern emerged suggesting that higher anxiety was linked to faster disengagement from negative-valenced stimuli. This pattern was partially mediated by subjective attentional control. The whole-brain vertex-wise analysis revealed a negative association between ACS scores and cortical thickness in the right rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC)-a region typically associated with emotional regulation. However, no significant associations were found between ACS scores and resting-state functional connectivity, and no significant mediating effect was identified for the right rACC thickness on the link between anxiety and affective task-switching performance. Overall, these findings suggest that anxiety may facilitate strategic avoidance of aversive information under certain conditions, and that ACS scores may primarily reflect biased beliefs about attentional control abilities rather than objective cognitive control abilities.
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