AUTHOR=Righi Stefania , Benedetti Viola , Giganti Fiorenza , Turano Maria Teresa , Raduazzo Greta , Viggiano Maria Pia TITLE=Anxiety is not the right choice! Individual differences in trait anxiety modulate biases in pseudoneglect JOURNAL=Frontiers in Human Neuroscience VOLUME=17 YEAR=2023 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1201898 DOI=10.3389/fnhum.2023.1201898 ISSN=1662-5161 ABSTRACT=

Pseudoneglect, the tendency to display a leftward perceptual bias, is consistently observed in line bisection tasks. Some studies have shown that pseudoneglect is sensitive to emotions. This emotion-related modulation is likely related to valence-dependent hemispheric lateralization, although the results do not converge. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies could be individual differences in emotional tone. Considering that negative and positive emotions produce different basic activations of the two hemispheres, emotional characteristics of the subjects, such as trait anxiety, could in fact modulate the pseudoneglect phenomenon. To verify this, high- and low-anxiety participants were asked to centrally bisect horizontal lines delimited by neutral or emotional (happy and sad) faces. In line with previous studies, results here showed a decrease in the leftward bisection error in the presence of happy faces, indicating a greater involvement of the left hemisphere in processing positive emotional stimuli. In addition, trait anxiety influenced the magnitude of the visual bias. High-anxiety subjects, compared to low-anxiety subjects, showed a general bias in visual attention toward the left space as a function of emotional valence. Results are discussed within the framework of valence-dependent hemispheric specialization and the relative degree of activation. In sum, our data highlight the relevance of considering emotional individual differences in studying the pseudoneglect phenomenon.