A Research On Cognitive Processing Bias In Junior High School New Enrollees Vulnerable To Anxiety

Cognitive approach, one of the most important approaches to anxiety research, assumes that patients with anxiety disorder and non-clinical high anxiety normaly show cognitive processing bias to threatening information in environments. By taking advantage of different empirical paradigms, researchers have developed a lot of tasks and tried to investigate how those easy-to-get-anxiety people behave differently from others in their attention, memory and interpretation about information relevant to anxiety.This project was designed to test whether the assumption of cognitive processing bias in anxiety-oriented people applies to young adolescents with high anxiety, as well as to explore new insights into positive preventions and interventions of adolescent anxiety. In the study, 60 new junior high school enrollees with high scores in Spence Children's Anxiety Scale and some other anxiety scales were recruited and administered in a series of tasks that are sensitive to information processing biases in anxiety, including Working Memory Task of Threat Words, Emotion Stroop Task, Visual Probe Task (VPT), and Ambiguous Sentences Interpretive Task. The results demonstrate that:(1) Working Memory Task of Threat Words in memory bias shows that highly anxious new enrollees have better memory of threatening information than their lowly anxious peers. On both measures of differences between recalling of threatening information and non-threatening information, high anxious students' scores are significantly higher than those of low anxious ones. Therefore, it confirms that working memory bias exists in high anxious adolescent students.(2) Highly anxious students perform as well as lowly anxious students in both Emotion Stroop Task and Visual Probe Task, which is designed to inspect attention bias. Task analyses show that failure in confirming attention bias is in part due to problems in experiment design, culture adaptations and how the tests are conducted.(3)In Ambiguous Sentences Interpretive Task, high anxious students do prefer recalling more threatening information related to school lives in their interpretation of ambiguous situations, which seems to be consistent with the assumption of interpretive bias in anxiety.