ANXIETY AND MEMORY - A RECALL BIAS FOR THREATENING WORDS IN HIGH ANXIETY

Few studies have directly examined the relationship between trait anxi ety and explicit memory for emotionally congruent material. Evidence f rom clinically anxious subjects, however, suggests a recall bias favou ring non-threatening words as opposed to threatening words. Two experi ments are reported which examined the recall performance of high- and low-trait anxious subjects. Contrary to the clinical anxiety findings, there was evidence of a recall bias for threatening rather than non-t hreatening words in the high-trait anxious group. Further analysis, ho wever, revealed that the recall bias was associated with state anxiety and depression levels rather than trait anxiety. The two experiments also showed that recall was greater for words appearing at the end of the list as opposed to words presented elsewhere in the list. The theo retical and methodological implications of these findings are discusse d. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.