Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous information: beyond the emotion-congruent effect.
The authors investigated how anxiety influences the use of contextual information in the resolution of ambiguity. Participants heard ambiguous homophones (threat/neutral, positive/neural, and neutral/neutral) with related contextual information. State anxiety was manipulated experimentally. The interpretations of anxious participants were influenced by context to a greater extent than those of control participants. Some mood-incongruent effects were observed where anxious participants were more likely to adopt neutral interpretations of potentially threatening stimuli. Effects were observed in a spelling task (Experiments 1 and 2) and in a lexical decision task (Experiment 3), with supraliminal, and subliminal presentation of contextual cues, and with 2 different anxiety-induction procedures. Results show how anxiety affects both the content and the process of resolution of ambiguity.
Blanchette
Isabelle
I
Department of Psychology, University of Manchester, Great Britain. isabelle.blanchette@man.ac.uk
Richards
Anne
A
D000339:Affect; D001007:Anxiety / Q000523:psychology*; D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D011897:Random Allocation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires