ANXIETY AND MOOD-CONGRUENT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY - A CONCEPTUAL FAILURE TO REPLICATE

This study further explored whether highly anxious participants exhibi t a mood-congruent autobiographical memory bias, as was found in two p revious studies (Burke & Mathews, 1992; Richards & Whittaker, 1990). T he 74 high and low trait anxious participants retrieved personal memor ies to anxiety-related, neutral, and positive cue words, and were then asked to recall the original cue words. The study also explored how e xpression of emotional versus factual responses might affect a memory bias. On most dependent measures, no differences were found between an xiety groups. However, low anxious participants recalled more memories overall than high anxious participants. In addition, the emotions gro ups recalled more words at free recall than the facts groups. Findings fail to support previous studies that found an autobiographical memor y bias to be associated with high anxiety, and cast more support for t he mounting evidence against a mood-congruent memory bias in anxiety.