Induced emotional interpretation bias and anxiety

Five experiments are reported showing that the interpretation of personally relevant emotional information can be modified by systematic exposure to c ongruent exemplars. Participants were induced to interpret ambiguous inform ation in a relatively threatening or a benign way. Comparison with a baseli ne condition suggested that negative and positive induction had similar but opposing effects. Induction of an interpretative bias did not require acti ve generation of personally relevant meanings, but such active processing w as necessary before state anxiety changed in parallel with the induced inte rpretative bias. These findings provide evidence consistent with a causal l ink between the deployment of interpretative bias and anxiety and reveal so mething of the processes underlying this association.