Making semantic judgements about affectively valanced words: A new test of processing bias in anxiety

In two experiments, subjects high and low in trait anxiety made judgements concerning the semantic nature of sentences containing emotionally valanced or emotionally neutral words. In Experiment 1, high trait anxious subjects responded to sentences containing affectively negative words more quickly than those containing neutral words. There were no anxiety related effects judgement times for sentences containing positive words, nor an effect of manipulating the self-referential nature of sentences. There was no bias in recall for affectively valanced words. Experiment 2 controlled for several potentially confounding variables and replicated the results of Experiment 1, finding that the faster processing of sentences containing affectively negative words was only present when the target word was spatially separated from the rest of the sentence. This was interpreted as indicating an attentional mechanism, broadly consistent with the Williams, Watts, MacLeod and Mathews (Cognitive Psychology and Emotional Disorders, 1988) model.