Processing bias in anxious subjects and repressors, measured by emotional Stroop interference and attentional allocation

We hypothesized that repressors would show cognitive avoidance of threatening information in an attention deployment task, but an attentional bias for the same information in an emotional interference task, while high anxious subjects would show a threat-related bias on both tasks. A modified Stroop task and a visual probe task (VPT) were used, with physical threat words, social threat words, social positive words and general positive words. The relationship of the response to the two tasks was also investigated. The results showed that high state anxiety was related to greater Stroop interference of physical threat words as well as social words, both threat and positive, No group effects were found for the Stroop, in spite of sufficient power. In contrast, in the VPT high trait anxious subjects shifted attention only towards social threat words, especially when these words were presented outside their attentional focus. No difference involving the repressor group was present. There was a small positive inter-task relation for social threat-related bias. It is suggested that the emotional biases measured by the Stroop and the VPT reflect automatic decisions about cognitive resource allocation at subsequent phases in information processing, at which increasingly more specific aspects of the emotional information are deciphered and used. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.