| Cognitive theories of anxiety predict that trait anxious individuals should show evidence of increased accessibility of affective (or threat-relevant) aspects of meaning compared to nonaffective (or neutral) aspects of meaning in strategic tasks. Two new paradigms were developed to test this hypothesis, using participants selected from the upper and lower 20% on the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger et al., 1970). In Experiment 1A, 45 High and 51 Low Anxiety participants made a series of affective and nonaffective decisions about a list of words. Affective decisions were made by classifying the word as safe or dangerous, and nonaffective decisions were made by classifying the word as physical or psychological. There was no significant effect of anxiety on decision latencies. Typically, anxiety-related effects on cognitive processing are seen when there is competition between the threat-relevant and the threat-irrelevant information (e.g., MacLeod & Matthews, 1991): this may not have been the case in Experiment 1A due to the blocked presentation of affective vs. nonaffective decisions. Therefore, the 16 High and 19 Low Anxiety participants in Experiment 1B were asked to make the same decisions about the same words, but were informed of the type of decision to be made just prior to word onset. The difference between affective and nonaffective decision latencies was significantly greater for High Anxiety participants than for Low Anxiety participants, providing support for relatively greater accessibility of affective information compared to nonaffective information. Using a different paradigm, Experiment 2 found no evidence for greater accessibility of affective information in anxiety. However, a complementary bias for decreased accessibility of nonaffective information was found. The similarity of pairs of events was rated by 47 High and 53 Low Anxiety participants. Each event was affectively positive or negative, and from the nonaffective domain of school or social situations. Results indicated that High Anxiety participants rated events from different domains as relatively more similar, and events from the same domain as relatively less similar, than did Low Anxiety participants. Results are discussed in terms of anxiety and accessibility of affective and nonaffective information. |
