Anxiety and Attentional Bias: State and Trait

MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986) found that anxious patients showed a tendency to react faster to a probe stimulus that appeared in the location of a threatening visual word rather than in that of a simultaneous neutral word. In 4 experiments, a total of 104 subjects drawn from the general population were tested on different variations of this task. A relationship to anxiety was confirmed, and it was shown that this relationship did not appear on animal names that also formed a semantically similar set and had an equal probability of being followed by a probe stimulus. Although the effect is therefore dependent on the content of the word, it builds up during the experimental session and is therefore likely to be due to increasing post-attentive awareness of the presence of threatening words. The most reliable results across experiments were found by using Trait rather than State Anxiety, and particularly by fitting a curvilinear relationship such that the exact degree of Anxiety makes little difference at low levels but becomes increasingly important at high levels. If State is used, the best relationship is found with an interaction with Trait, such that State makes more difference at high values of Trait. This means that the effect must be to some extent due to lasting personality characteristics. It is not something that happens to everybody when in a temporary state.