Explicit and implicit memory, trait anxiety, and repressive coping style

Individuals with high trait anxiety, low trait anxiety, and repressive coping style were compared on explicit and implicit memory for physical threat words, social threat words, positive words, and neutral words. The results replicate earlier findings to the effect that bias indexes correlate within memory type (implicit and explicit memory, respectively) but not within word category across memory type, suggesting that explicit and implicit memory bias represent two separate forms of emotional processing. Neither explicit nor implicit memory bias, however, was found to be associated with trait anxiety, or with repressive coping style—although an earlier finding of a negative association between anger/irritability and implicit memory bias was partly replicated. On the other hand, repressive coping style was found to be more associated with explicit than implicit memory performance in general (i.e. independently of the valence of words), which suggests the hypothesis that repressors, as compared with high and low trait-anxious individuals, have a general tendency to process information more at an explicit than an implicit level.