Anxiety and repression in attention and retention.
High- and low-anxious college students (as determined by scores on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale; A. W. Bendig, 1956) and repressors (low anxiety and high scores on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale; D. P. Crowne & D. Marlowe, 1964) were compared on 3 cognitive tasks. High-anxious participants more often spelled the negative emotional meaning of ambiguous homophones (e.g., pane/pain) and forgot more of their free associations to emotional cue words than did the low-anxious participants. The repressors also detected the emotional meaning of the homophones but unlike the anxious, the repressors did recall their associations to the emotional words. In a working memory task using nonemotional items, the moderately anxious participants recalled fewer words than did the low- and high-anxious participants. The results confirm that both trait anxiety and repression affect information processing at a variety of stages but not in the same way. Repressors were sensitive to, and retentive of, negative emotional stimuli.
Terry
W S
WS
Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 28223, USA. wsterry@email.uncc.edu
Burns
J S
JS
D000328:Adult; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008297:Male; D008347:Manifest Anxiety Scale; D010153:Paired-Associate Learning; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D012928:Social Desirability; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D014706:Verbal Learning