[Truncated abstract] It has consistently been found that individuals who are more highly vulnerable to anxious mood selectively attend to emotionally negative stimuli as compared to those lower in anxiety vulnerability, suggesting that such anxiety-prone individuals possess an attentional bias favouring negative information. Two of the most consistent tasks used to reveal this bias have been the attentional probe and emotional Stroop tasks. It has been noted, however, that these tasks have not been capable of differentiating the relative role of attentional engagement with, and attentional disengagement from emotionally valenced stimuli, suggesting that either of these attentional processes could account for the attentional bias observed in individuals with high levels of anxiety vulnerability on the attentional probe and emotional Stroop tasks. A number of resent studies have claimed support for the operation of biased attentional disengagement in anxiety using a modified attentional cueing paradigm, concluding that individuals more vulnerable to anxious mood have a selective difficulty disengaging attention from emotionally negative stimuli. The current thesis highlights the possibility, however, that the structure of the modified cueing paradigm could allow individual differences in initial attentional engagement with differentially valenced stimuli to be interpreted as a selective disengagement bias. ... The modified emotional Stroop task employed in the current research measured participant's ability to engage with the emotional content of differentially valenced stimuli having initially processed non-emotional information (stimulus colour), and measured their relative ability to disengage attention from such emotional content to process non-emotional stimulus information. Results using this modified Stroop task suggested that those with high vulnerability to anxious mood were disproportionately fast to engage with the content of negative as compared to non-negative stimuli whereas those with low vulnerability to anxious mood did not display this pattern. The results provided no support for presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional disengagement from the content of differentially valenced stimuli. Results derived from the modified emotional Stroop task therefore provided support for the presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional engagement with the content of emotionally negative stimuli, but no support for a bias in attentional disengagement from the content of such material. The final study in the present series of experiments was designed to address the novel possibility that a bias in attentional disengagement could result in ongoing semantic activation of negatively valenced stimuli which would not necessarily be indexed by previous tasks assessing biased attentional disengagement. The results of this final study, however, provided no evidence to suggest the presence of anxiety-linked differences in ongoing semantic activation of differentially valenced stimuli. The present series of studies therefore provide support for the presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional engagement with the content of emotionally negative stimuli, while providing no support for the presence of an anxiety-linked bias in attentional disengagement from negative stimuli.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/279686 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Clarke, Patrick |
| Publisher | University of Western Australia. School of Psychology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Patrick Clarke, http://www.itpo.uwa.edu.au/UWA-Computer-And-Software-Use-Regulations.html |
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