title: An anxiety-related bias in semantic activation when processing threat/neutral homographs.
abstract: Three experiments are reported comparing high- and low-trait anxious subjects in terms of their patterns of semantic activation in response to ambiguous primes, with one threat-related and one neutral meaning. Such primes were followed by targets related to either their threat or neutral meaning, or by unrelated targets, in a lexical decision task. Experiments 1 to 3 employed stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 750 msec, 500 msec, and 1250 msec, respectively. At 500-msec SOA all subjects showed facilitation for both meanings. At 750-msec SOA the only significant priming effect was that for the threat-related meaning in the high-anxiety group, and a similar trend was found at 1250-msec SOA. Consideration of the patterns of priming for targets following ambiguous threat/neutral primes suggest that at the longer SOAs, high-anxiety subjects consciously "lock on" to a threatening interpretation if one has been made available by earlier automatic spreading activation.
authors.affiliation: Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Richards
authors.forename: C C
authors.initials: CC
authors.lastname: French
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001143:Arousal; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011930:Reaction Time; D012660:Semantics