2026-10-14T09:24:03Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.46215 2026-08-26T13:41:32Z

2026-08-26 Vigilance to the Mouth, Avoidance to the Face: How Dynamic Threat Encoding Shapes the Neural Timeline of State Anxiety doi:10.57760/sciencedb.46215 en The vigilance-avoidance hypothesis in anxiety is well-documented, but how dynamic threat encoding shapes subsequent facial feature processing remains unclear. This study bridged this gap using a 2 (Emotion: happy, angry) × 2 (Study phase: dynamic, static) × 3 (Test phase: eye, mouth, whole face) × 2 (Group: control, state anxiety) mixed ERP design. Participants encoded dynamic or static emotional faces, then judged emotional consistency against static test features. N170 results revealed early hypervigilance in the state anxiety group specifically following dynamic encoding and toward mouth features for angry faces. Conversely, LPC results indicated late cognitive avoidance (reduced angry-happy amplitude) in anxiety for static whole faces. These findings elucidate the neural timeline of threat processing, emphasizing how prior dynamic contexts and specific action units (mouth) drive early anxiety-related cognitive biases. state anxiety; vigilance-avoidance hypothesis; facial dynamic; feature processing Yiru Bai Haiqing Fang Xiaodian Wei Junxing Wang Hailing Wang RESTRICTED dataset Science Data Bank