Repetition Blindness In Trait Anxious University Students Under Different Emotional Cues

Large amount of previous studies have shown that trait anxieties and anxiety patients have attention bias of negative information. But most of the research adopts emotion words as the experimental materials instead of using face emotional pictures which have higher ecological validity and closer to real life. Some studies have used the face emotional pictures as the experimental material, but these kinds of studies always neglect inspecting positive, neutral and negative emotional clues together. However, Repetition Blindness should be considered as one of the cognitive effects which attentional resources also play important role. In the latest Repetition Blindness Theory, The Competition Hypothesis put more emphasis on competition resources.In this study, the participants those with high or low trait anxiety were filtered by the trait anxiety part of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory(STAI) which prepared by Spielberger et al. And it aims to verify the attentional bias problem of different trait anxiety of college students with positive, neutral and negative emotional pictures as the experimental material. On the basis, the specific attentional bias of the students with trait anxiety is the breakthrough point to inspect the effection on repetition blindness, which will also indirectly verify the reasonableness of The Competition Hypothesis.This study obtained the following conclusions:(1)Under various emotional cues as well as trait anxiety of different levels,The observation of the Inhibition of Return(IOR) and Repetition Blindness illustrate widespread existence and stability of the two.(2)University students with high trait anxiety have more difficulties to get rid of the influence of negative information while under the negative emotional cues. They have worse return inhibiting ability(3)In RSVP tasks, the attention of university students with high trait anxiety is easy to be locked with negative emotional cues. Larger repetition blindness is produced due to thelimited attention resources assigned to repeated stimulus.(4)Among Repetition Blindness Effect Theory, Competition Theory is more scientific and reasonable.