To Look or Not to Look: An Eye Movement Study of Hypervigilance During Change Detection in High and Low Spider Fearful Students Jorg Huijding and Birgit Mayer Erasmus University Ernst H. W. Koster Ghent University Peter Muris Erasmus University Previous eye movement studies of attentional bias in spider fear reported inconsistent results with respect to early attentional capture, suggesting that overt attentional capture only reliably occurs under specific circumstances. In addition, none of these studies explored covert attention. The present study examined attentional bias in spider phobia using a change detection paradigm that was expected to provide good conditions for documenting attentional capture. In contrast to our expectations, eye movement data showed that all participants’ first fixations were fastest on general negative targets, whereas participants’ first fixations on spider targets were slower in the spider fearful than in the nonfearful group. In addition, spider fearful participants made more nontarget fixations before fixating on a spider target than did nonfearful participants. Thus, we found that participants’ overt attention was more quickly focused on general negative targets, whereas covert attentional processes enabled initial avoidance of fear-relevant (i.e. spider) stimuli. The present findings have important implications for research on attention and fear as they indicate that fearful individuals are not characterized by static attentional orienting toward threat but, under certain conditions, may avert attention from threat automatically. Keywords: fear, attentional bias, hypervigilance, phobia, spider Systematic biases in the allocation of attention to disorder- relevant stimuli are implicated in several forms of psychopathol- ogy, including the anxiety disorders (e.g., Harvey, Watkins, Man- sell, & Shafran, 2004). The basic idea is that anxious individuals are hypervigilant for threat in their environment and will detect threat more rapidly than nonanxious individuals. After detection of threat, attention will remain focused at threat at the expense of processing other information. This process of hypervigilance is assumed to be involved in the onset and maintenance of anxiety symptoms (Mathews & MacLeod, 1994; Eysenck, 1992). In gen- eral, a large amount of research has yielded empirical support for the idea that threat is characterized by attentional biases (see reviews of Bar-Haim, Lamy, Pergamin, Bakermans-Kranenburg, & van IJzerdoorn, 2007; Cisler & Koster, 2010). At the same time it is becoming clear that attentional bias in anxiety is not a unitary process. For instance, while some studies seem to point to fast attentional capture by threat-relevant stimuli in high anxious individuals (Mogg & Bradley, 2006; Öhman, Flykt, & Esteves, 2001; Rinck & Becker, 2006), other studies have shown that high anxious individuals have difficulties to disengage from threat (e.g., Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001; Koster, Crombez, Verschuere, & De Houwer, 2004). Moreover, it has been observed that anxious individuals are characterized by a vigilance- avoidance pattern of attention allocation with respect to threat- related stimuli (Mogg & Bradley, 1998; Rinck & Becker, 2006). These three components of attentional bias are thought to occur at different stages of processing, with early attentional capture being followed by transient difficulties to disengage attention which is followed by attentional avoidance of threat (Cisler & Koster, 2010). Another distinction that has been made with respect to attentional processes pertains to overt and covert attention. Overt attentional processes direct movements of the eyes or head to bring a visual location of interest into the fovea, whereas covert atten- tional processes increase attention to a specific location of the visual field without moving the eyes or head (Posner, 1980). With respect to attentional bias in anxiety it has been proposed that individuals may overtly avoid allocation of attention to threat, while concurrently covertly maintaining attention for threat (Weierich, Treat & Hollingworth, 2008). Because of the complex nature of attentional processes recent articles have concluded that “there is a need for more refined investigation of the different stages of information processing in which anxious and nonanxious individuals differ” (Bar-Haim et al., 2007, p. 18), and that re- searchers should “attempt to elucidate a temporal description of attentional biases toward threat” (Cisler, Bacon, & Williams, 2009, p. 230). This article was published Online First May 2, 2011. Jorg Huijding, Birgit Mayer and Peter Muris, Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Ernst H. W. Koster, Department of Experimental-Clinical and Health Psychology, Gh- ent University, Ghent, Belgium. We thank Martijn Peeters and Hila ˆl Yalc ¸inkaya for their help in collect- ing the data. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jorg Huijding, Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Woud- estein T13-30, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: huijding@fsw.eur.nl Emotion © 2011 American Psychological Association 2011, Vol. 11, No. 3, 666 – 674 1528-3542/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0022996 666