THE PERSISTENT USE OF NEGATIVE AFFECT BY ANXIOUS INDIVIDUALS TO ESTIMATE RISK

Three experiments investigated how trait anxiety would influence indiv iduals' assumptions about the relevance of their experiences of state anxiety for judgments of risk. Experiment 1 found that attributions of state anxiety to a judgment-irrelevant source reduced the risk estima tes of low, but not of high, trait-anxious individuals. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that attribution manipulations reduce the influe nce of state affect on judgment only when the state affect is inconsis tent with participants' trait affect. Experiment 3 revealed that these effects can be controlled by explicitly manipulating participants ass umptions about the relevance of their feelings. Regardless of the leve l of trait anxiety, attributions were effective at reducing mood effec ts when facts, but not feelings, were assumed to be the relevant basis for judgment. Overall, the results suggest that trait-consistent affe ct is more readily assumed to be informative and hence is more likely to be relied on than trait-inconsistent affect.