作者
Andrew Mathews, Anne Richards, Michael Eysenck
发表日期
1989/2
期刊
Journal of abnormal psychology
卷号
98
期号
1
页码范围
31
出版商
American Psychological Association
简介
In previous studies, we have established that anxiety states are characterized by an attentional bias that favors the processing of threatening stimuli. In the present study we extend this finding to ambiguous stimuli, specifically, homophones with spellings that correspond to either a threatening or a neutral meaning. As predicted, clinically anxious subjects used the threatening spellings relatively more than did controls, whereas recovered subjects were intermediate in this respect. Threatening words were associated with greater skin conductance responses than were neutral words, but the groups did not differ in their electrodermal reactions to homophones. We take these findings as evidence that, although the different meanings of ambiguous stimuli may be processed in parallel by all subjects, an interpretive bias operates such that anxiety-prone individuals tend to become preferentially aware of the more …
引用总数
学术搜索中的文章
A Mathews, A Richards, M Eysenck - Journal of abnormal psychology, 1989