Attention to anger-relevant and irrelevant stimuli following naturalistic insult

Attentional biases toward mood-congruent, task-irrelevant stimuli have previously been demonstrated in anxious and depressed subjects using the emotional Stroop procedure. We used a variation of this method to investigate basic information processing mechanisms underlying anger arousal. Eighty-eight undergraduates classified as high or low trait anger according to the Trait Anger Scale were randomly assigned to insult or no-insult conditions. Subjects' response latencies to name the colors of computer-presented anger words, positive emotion words, and neutral words were then assessed. An interaction between anger classification, word, and insult was found. Specifically, anger words interfered with the performance of high trait anger-insulted subjects, but not with performance of low trait anger-insulted subjects. There was no effect of word type for all non-insulted subjects. This finding is consistent with Persons and Miranda's mood-state hypothesis. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.