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

    Blanchette, I. and Richards, Anne (2003) Anxiety and the interpretation of ambiguous information: beyond the emotion-congruent effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 132 (2), pp. 294-309. ISSN 0096-3445.

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    Abstract

    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.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
    Depositing User: Sarah Hall
    Date Deposited: 21 Jan 2020 17:02
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:57
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/30654

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