COPING DISPOSITIONS, ACTUAL ANXIETY, AND THE INCIDENTAL-LEARNING OF SUCCESS-RELATED AND FAILURE-RELATED STIMULI

Coping dispositions (cognitive avoidance, vigilance) and actual anxiet y (worry, emotionality) are investigated as determinants of the incide ntal learning of stimuli which are associated with the experience of s uccess or failure. In a first trial of a laboratory study, 83 subjects (44 men and 39 women) had to solve 5-letter-anagrams of different deg rees of difficulty within a period of 10 sec for each anagram Interspe rsed in this sequence were unsolvable anagrams (''pseudo-anagrams''). For 50% of the 114 anagrams presented on a computer screen, the subjec t received feedback on the solvability of the item, for the remaining anagrams feedback was withheld. The central aim of the study was to an alyze the recognition of success-related items (solved anagrams) as co mpared to failure-related items (unsolved but solvable anagrams with f eedback), Furthermore, the recognition of pseudo-anagrams with no feed back concerning solvability (uncertainty items) was of interest. To th is end, a second trial with a recognition test was carried out. In thi s trial, the subject was confronted with the anagrams of Trial 1 toget her with an equal number of new anagrams (distractors). The results yi eld person-specific relationships between actual anxiety and the recog nition of success and failure items. For persons high in cognitive avo idance, anxiety was positively associated with the recognition of succ ess items. No such relationship could be established for failure or un certainty items. On the other hand, for individuals low in avoidance, anxiety was negatively associated with the recognition of unsolved ana grams.