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.
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 |
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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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