THE USE OF AN EMOTIONAL PRIMING PARADIGM WITH CLINICALLY ANXIOUS SUBJECTS

The present study sought to extend and refine the emotional priming pa radigm described by Power and Brewin (1990). The paradigm involves the presentation of emotion-related prime stimuli followed by negative or positive self-descriptive adjective probes. The original study showed that, following a negative prime, normal subjects were slower to endo rse negative adjectives as self-descriptive at a long delay relative t o a short delay. This was interpreted as evidence for some form of sel f-esteem regulation process. The present study partially replicated ea rlier findings with normal subjects. However, a clinically anxious gro up (generalized anxiety disorder patients) showed a different pattern of response. There was evidence of a priming effect in these individua ls, ie, a processing bias in favor of negative stimuli The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.