Multidimensional anxiety and content-specificity effects in preferential processing of threat

We examined the relative contribution of specific components of multidimensional anxiety to cognitive biases in the processing of threat-related information in three experiments. Attentional bias was assessed by the emotional Stroop word color-naming task, interpretative bias by an on-line inference processing task, and explicit memory bias by sensitivity W) and response criterion (P) from word-recognition scores. Multiple regression analyses revealed, first, that phobic anxiety and evaluative anxiety predicted selective attention to physical- and ego-threat information, respectively; cognitive anxiety predicted selective attention to both types of threat. Second, phobic anxiety predicted inhibition of inferences related to physically threatening outcomes of ambiguous situations, And, third, evaluative anxiety predicted a response bias, rather than a genuine memory bias, in the reporting of presented and nonpresented ego-threat information. Other anxiety components, such as motor and physiological anxiety or interpersonal and daily-routines anxiety made no specific contribution to any cognitive bias. Multidimensional anxiety measures are useful for detecting content-specificity effects in cognitive biases.