Vigilance to the Mouth, Avoidance to the Face: How Dynamic Threat Encoding Shapes the Neural Timeline of State Anxiety

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.