MAKING SEMANTIC JUDGMENTS ABOUT AFFECTIVELY VALANCED WORDS - A NEW TEST OF PROCESSING BIAS IN ANXIETY

In two experiments, subjects high and low in trait anxiety made judgem ents concerning the semantic nature of sentences containing emotionall y valanced or emotionally neutral words. In Experiment 1, high trait a nxious subjects responded to sentences containing affectively negative words more quickly than those containing neutral words. There were no anxiety related effects judgement times for sentences containing posi tive words, nor an effect of manipulating the self-referential nature of sentences. There was no bias in recall for affectively valanced wor ds. Experiment 2 controlled for several potentially confounding variab les and replicated the results of Experiment 1, finding that the faste r processing of sentences containing affectively negative words was on ly present when the target word was spatially separated from the rest of the sentence. This was interpreted as indicating an attentional mec hanism, broadly consistent with the Williams, Watts, MacLeod and Mathe ws (Cognitive Psychology and Emotional Disorders, 1988) model.