Hemisphere asymmetry and the processing of emotional words in anxiety.
High- and low-trait anxious subjects participated in a divided visual field emotional Stroop task. Subjects identified the colour of unilaterally presented threat-related, positive and neutral words. The high- and low-trait groups differed in terms of their accuracy scores but not in their reaction times. Analysis of the accuracy data revealed that the high-trait group exhibited right hemisphere interference for emotional relative to neutral trials whereas the low-trait showed right hemisphere interference for threat-related trials only. The idea that the right hemisphere is differentially specialised for the processing of emotional information was supported.
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D011930:Reaction Time; D014794:Visual Fields; D014825:Vocabulary