Anxiety and the use of strategies in the performance of a sentence-picture verification task.
An experiment was conducted to examine processing strategy differences in anxiety. The sentence-picture verification task was modified to incorporate a block of threat-related trials (involving a knife and a rifle) and a block of neutral trials (involving a truck and a chair). It was predicted that the high-trait, relative to low-trait, anxious individuals would prefer to use a linguistic strategy for threat-related as compared to neutral trials. In addition, the idea that an image-based strategy is more important for processing emotional material was examined. There was some support for both of these hypotheses.
Richards
A
A
Department of Psychology, University of London, England.
French
C C
CC
Randall
F
F
D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001143:Arousal; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010555:Personality Inventory; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning