Processing bias in anxious subjects andrepressors,measured by emotional Stroop interferenceandattentional allocation

We hypothesized that repressors would show cognitive avoidance ofthreateninginformation in an attention deployment task, but an attentional bias for the sameinformation inan emotional interference task, while high anxious subjects would show athreat-related bias onboth tasks. A modified Stroop task and a visual probe task (VPT) wereused, with physical threatwords, social threat words, social positive words and general positivewords. The relationship ofthe response to the two tasks was also investigated. The resultsshowed that high state anxietywas related to greater Stroop interference of physical threat wordsas well as social words, boththreat and positive. No group effects were found for the Stroop, inspite of su.cient power. Incontrast, in the VPT high trait anxious subjects shifted attention onlytowards social threatwords, especially when these words were presented outside their attentionalfocus. No differenceinvolving the repressor group was present. There was a small positiveinter-task relation forsocial threat- related bias. It is suggested that the emotional biasesmeasured by the Stroop andthe VPT reflect automatic decisions about cognitive resourceallocation at subsequent phases ininformation processing, at which increasingly more specificaspects of the emotional informationare deciphered and used.