Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous information: Beyond the emotion-congruent effect

被引:55
作者
Blanchette, I
Richards, A
机构
[1] Univ Manchester, Dept Psychol, Manchester M13 9PL, Lancs, England
[2] Univ London, Birkbeck Coll, Dept Psychol, London, England
关键词
D O I
10.1037/0096-3445.132.2.294
中图分类号
B84 [心理学];
学科分类号
04 ; 0402 ;
摘要
The authors investigated how anxiety influences the use of contextual information in the resolution of ambiguity. Participants heard ambiguous homophones (threat/neutral, positive/neutral, 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.
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收藏
页码:294 / 309
页数:16
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