Transfer of training emotionally biased interpretations

Non-anxious college students first performed a semantic-judgement task that was designed to train either threat-related or threat-unrelated interpretations of threat-ambiguous homographs (e.g. mug). Next they performed an ostensibly separate transfer task of constructing personal mental images for single words, in a series that included new, threat-ambiguous homographs. In two experiments, the number of threat-related interpretations in the transfer task significantly increased following threat-related experience during the training phase, compared to other training conditions. We conclude that interpretive biases typically shown by anxious people can be established in non-anxious students in ways that generalize to novel tasks and materials. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.