The Effect Of Trait Anxiety On Self-prioritization

Background: Anxiety is a feeling of fear about threats and uncertainties in the future.Moderate anxiety level can improve our work efficiency and vigilance of threatening stimulation,but if we have been in high anxiety level,a variety of psychological diseases will come to us.Anxiety is a very important susceptibility factor for anxiety disorders.Previous studies have found that people with anxiety disorders had abnormal self-processing representations,but paid little attention to normal people.Previous researches often used familiar stimulus materials such as names,faces and focused on the neural mechanism of self at higher cognitive level.Sui etc.developed a new paradigm in which subjects were asked to correlate different abstract geometric shapes with different labels indicating different identities(such as “you”,“stranger”)and subsequently judge whether random pairs of shape and label were matched.This task can rule out the influence of familiarity factor.Thus,we aimed to use it to further explore the impact of trait anxiety on self-processing.Methods and Results: The first study explored the relationship between trait anxiety and self-prioritization using the associative learning approach.The results showed significant positive linear correlation between trait anxiety scores and self-advantage.The second study explored the impact of trait anxiety on self-processing using high temporal resolution of ERP technology.The results showed trait anxiety had little effect on self-processing on the behavior index,but had significant effect in the early N1,P2 and N2 stages.To be more specific,individuals with high trait anxiety would show self-bias earlier than those with low anxiety.Conclusion:(1)trait anxiety had little effect on self-processing in terms of behavior index.(2)self-processing would be affected by trait anxiety in the early N1,P2 and N2 stages in terms of ERP index.This study provided new evidence for researches about anxiety and self.