BackgroundCompetitive 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.MethodsA 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.ConclusionCompetitive 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.