Attentional Bias In Trait Anxious University Students

According to Spielberger, anxiety can be called as Trait Anxiety when it is considered as a kind of personality trait. It is the stable individual difference from the perspective of anxiety tendency. Since the State-Trait Anxiety Theory, researches on anxiety come into a new age. The relationship between Trait Anxiety and Attention Bias becomes the focus among the large of cognitive studies related with anxiety. Some researchers put forward interrelated theories after deep and systematic discussion about it.This study includes two experiments. The first experiment hypothesis: there is relationship between Trait Anxiety and Attention Bias. Attention Bias will be produced when High Trait Anxiety individuals facing the negative emotion stimulus, which will not be appear among the Low Trait Anxiety individuals. The State-Trait Anxiety scale (STAT-T) by Spielberger will be applied in this experiment, there are 50 participants, in which 25 for High/Low Trait Anxiety group respectively. The qualified participants will take part in the dot probe task, which is adopted from the Macleod's dot probe task. The findings are that the reaction time of the High Trait Anxiety individuals to the negative emotion words are shorter than to the neutral and positive words, reflecting a kind of negative stimulus attention bias; whereas, there is no differences among the negative trait anxiety to these three types of words, without any attention bias. The second experiment hypothesis: there exist reaction time differences for the High Trait Anxiety individuals in the valid or invalid clue situation, which is called clue effect; the attention bias of the High Trait Anxiety individuals to the negative emotion words will have difficult to disengage their attention from the negative stimulus . The tasks of this experiment are adopted from the cue target task by Posner et al. The 50 participants will have a rest for ten minutes after finishing the first experiments, and then continue participating in the second experiment. The findings are: there are no reaction time differences when the High Trait Anxiety individuals in the valid clue situation face the negative, neutral and positive words, however, in the invalid clue situation, the reaction time of the negative words is longer than to the neutral and positive words, reflecting difficulty disengaging from the negative stimulus, In the valid or invalid situation, there are no obvious differences for the Low Trait Anxiety individuals to these types of words, but the reaction time of the High Trait Anxiety individuals in the valid clue situation to these words is shorter than in the invalid clue situation, reflecting clue effect. Combining the two experiments, it is proved that there is some relationships between Trait Anxiety and Attention Deflection, moreover, these results suggest that individuals with high trait anxiety may have difficulty disengaging from the negative emotion stimulus.