Isolating Delayed Attentional Disengagement from Biased Orienting to Signals of Threat in Anxiety – Not There Yet

It has often been argued that increased ‘attentional bias to threat’ in anxiety is due to delayed attentional disengagement from threat stimuli, rather than increased attentional orienting towards such signals. In 2013, Clarke et al. [Anxiety, Stress, and Coping, 26, 1 (2013)] published a critique of this literature, pointing out that most studies had used paradigms that could not isolate attentional disengagement from attentional orienting. Since Clarke et al.’s critique, over fifty studies claiming to measure attentional disengagement from threat as a function of anxiety have been published, many continuing to use suboptimal methods. In this review we outline why these commonly used paradigms fail in providing a valid measure of attentional disengagement from stimuli differing in emotional content. We also highlight studies where the paradigms and task parameters do allow for a valid measurement of attentional disengagement and suggest best practice for the field moving forward.