Attentional biases in the processing of emotional information

Subjects high in trait anxiety preferentially allocate attention towards threatening stimuli. This bias has been found even when subjects are unaware of the stimuli. However, in some situations anxious subjects do not attend to threat, perhaps as a result of regulative strategies. Other work indicates that repressive subjects are anxious subjects who are particularly adept at avoiding emotional stimuli. By applying the methods used to assess attentional biases in anxiety to repressive subjects, these studies explore mechanisms of emotion regulation.; In two experiments (Ns = 90 and 117), university students completed modifications of both the Stroop color naming task, in which half the trials were masked to prevent awareness of the words, and a probe task (MacLeod, Mathews, & Tata, 1986). Both tasks used reaction times to measure attentional biases towards physically threatening, socially threatening, and positive words relative to neutral words. Subjects were categorized as either high anxious (HA), low anxious (LA) or repressive (RP) on the basis of trait anxiety and defensiveness questionnaires. The masked Stroop task was hypothesized to reflect semantic associations with anxiety present in HA and possibly RP subjects. The unmasked Stroop and probe tasks were expected to reflect attentional regulative strategies.; In the first study, no stress manipulation was used and no group differences in attentional biases were evident, even on the masked trials. The second study employed either an anxiety induction procedure or a relaxation procedure. This mood manipulation did not affect the masked Stroop task, but it strongly affected the other tasks. Only suggestive evidence was found for predicted automatic attentional biases on the masked Stroop task. The unmasked Stroop and probe tasks provided unrelated indices of attentional bias. HA subjects moved attention towards threat words, but only under stress, as expected. RP subjects attended to threat on the Stroop task, but were able to avoid it on the probe task, perhaps because an alternative stimulus was available on which to focus attention. Other findings, including gender differences, are discussed in terms of a model of information processing and the strategic regulation of emotional activation.