Abstract
BACKGROUND: Competitive anxiety is common in adolescent athletes and may bias the processing of socio-emotional cues in competition settings. However, evidence linking competitive trait anxiety to specific attentional-bias components in adolescent tennis players remains limited. This study examined group characteristics of competitive trait anxiety and tested whether athletes with different anxiety levels show distinct attentional-bias patterns toward emotional faces. METHODS: A total of 120 adolescent tennis players (aged 14-18 years) who participated in the 2020 Hunan Provincial Youth Tennis Championship completed the Pre-competition Emotion Scale-Trait (PES-T). Athletes scoring in the top and bottom 20% were selected to form a high-anxiety group (n = 24) and a low-anxiety group (n = 24). Using positive, negative, and neutral faces selected from the Chinese Affective Face Picture System, participants completed a modified dot-probe task. Indices of attentional orienting and difficulty disengaging from emotional cues were computed. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted between anxiety dimensions and attentional-bias indices. RESULTS: (1) Female athletes reported significantly higher competitive trait anxiety than males. (2) Competitive trait anxiety tended to decrease with greater age, longer training experience, and higher sport level. (3) The high-anxiety group showed a pronounced difficulty disengaging from negative faces, indicating a negative attentional bias; the low-anxiety group showed a significant bias toward positive faces.(4)Within the high-anxiety group, social expectation anxiety was positively associated with, and significantly predicted, difficulty disengaging from negative cues. CONCLUSION: Competitive trait anxiety in adolescent tennis players is shaped by gender and training experience and may influence cognitive resource allocation by biasing attention to emotional information-especially by prolonging engagement with negative cues. Social expectation anxiety appears to be a key risk factor for negative disengagement bias. Targeted attention training and pre-competition psychological interventions may help improve emotion regulation and competitive performance.