Processing bias in anxious subjects and repressors, measured by emotional Stroop interference and attentional allocation

We hypothesized that repressors would show cognitive avoidance of threateni ng information in an attention deployment task, but an attentional bias for the same information in an emotional interference task, while high anxious subjects would show a threat-related bias on both tasks. A modified Stroop task and a visual probe task (VPT) were used, with physical threat words, social threat words, social positive words and general positive words. The relationship of the response to the two tasks was also investigated. The re sults showed that high state anxiety was related to greater Stroop interfer ence of physical threat words as well as social words, both threat and posi tive, No group effects were found for the Stroop, in spite of sufficient po wer. In contrast, in the VPT high trait anxious subjects shifted attention only towards social threat words, especially when these words were presente d outside their attentional focus. No difference involving the repressor gr oup was present. There was a small positive inter-task relation for social threat-related bias. It is suggested that the emotional biases measured by the Stroop and the VPT reflect automatic decisions about cognitive resource allocation at subsequent phases in information processing, at which increa singly more specific aspects of the emotional information are deciphered an d used. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.