Literature suggests that perturbations in both «bottom up» attention mechanisms and «top down» executive control processes may play a
central role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety.22 These perturbations extend to both
emotionally charged and affectively neutral stimuli, reflecting both preferential treatment of specific categories of stimuli (i.e., bias to threat cues) and heightened vigilance of one's own performance and behaviour (i.e., cognitive monitoring).