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High levels of anxiety can strain a person鈥檚 ability to control their attention, and this effect has been shown to increase with age, according to an analysis of dozens of studies.

Ran Shi, then at聽the University of Sydney in Australia, and her colleagues combined the results of 58 studies that measured the attention and anxiety level of 8292 children and adults in total, who either self-reported their anxiety or demonstrated it through behavioural tests.

These studies examined various components of attention control. These included inhibition, which involves preventing attention from being pulled towards irrelevant stimuli; switching, which involves keeping attention focused on a relevant task; and updating, which involves evaluating how relevant new information is and overwriting old information.

Across all studies, the researchers found that overall attention control was significantly worse in people who are more anxious. Highly anxious groups, whether or not they had been clinically diagnosed, had similar deficits in attention control.

There were significant decreases in performance on inhibition and switching tasks, but no such effect seen for updating. These attentional deficits lowered anxious participants鈥� response times but didn鈥檛 significantly affect their accuracy in tests.

The team also found that the older someone was, the more likely they were to experience these attention control deficits.

鈥淭he current finding that age was able to predict the effect of anxiety on attention control, especially when young children were included in the analysis, provides preliminary evidence that anxiety impairs the development of attention control processes,鈥� the team writes.

But the researchers note that they were unable to determine whether anxiety was a cause or effect of impaired attention control. 鈥淭he same deficits may also lead to decreased ability to regulate emotional processing and serve to maintain anxiety,鈥� they write.