A MEMORY BIAS FOR THREAT IN HIGH-TRAIT ANXIETY

The suggestion that high-trait anxiety is associated with a memory bia s for threatening information has so far received little empirical sup port. Two Studies are reported which were designed to test this predic tion and replicate findings recently reported by the current authors. In both studies subjects were required to encode and recall a list con taining positive, threatening and non-threatening negative words. Anal yses revealed that whereas the low-trait anxious subjects recalled equ ivalent numbers of threatening and non-threatening words, the high-tra it anxious subjects recalled significantly more of the threatening wor ds. Further analyses suggested that the tendency for anxious individua ls to recall more threatening than non-threatening words was not simpl y due to more of these words being endorsed as self-descriptive by the se subjects. Additionally, both high-and low-trait anxious subjects sh owed a strong memory bias for positive rather than negative words, a f inding which is consistent with previous research. The theoretical and methodological implications of these findings are discussed. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.