An Anxiety-Related Bias in Semantic Activation When Processing Threat/Neutral Homographs

Abstract

Three experiments are reported comparing high- and low-trait anxious subjects in terms of their patterns of semantic activation in response to ambiguous primes, with one threat-related and one neutral meaning. Such primes were followed by targets related to either their threat or neutral meaning, or by unrelated targets, in a lexical decision task. Experiments 1 to 3 employed stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 750 msec, 500 msec, and 1250 msec, respectively. At 500-msec SOA all subjects showed facilitation for both meanings. At 750-msec SOA the only significant priming effect was that for the threat-related meaning in the high-anxiety group, and a similar trend was found at 1250-msec SOA. Consideration of the patterns of priming for targets following ambiguous threat/neutral primes suggest that at the longer SOAs, high-anxiety subjects consciously "lock on" to a threatening interpretation if one has been made available by earlier automatic spreading activation.

Interpretation bias characterizes trait rumination

“…Because no homograph norms are available in Hebrew, we followed the procedure outlined by Richards and French (1992) in pretesting homographs and targets. Thus, student volunteers listed associations for an initial pool of 140 negative/benign homographs.…”

“…Experiment 1 used a design identical to that of Richards and French (1992). In this study, benign and negative homograph-related and unrelated targets were used to contrast an interpretive-bias account with a general-negativity account.…”

“…Finally, we evaluated the content specificity of the biases. To answer these questions, we used a paradigm developed by Richards and French (1992) to document interpretation biases in anxiety. In the original paradigm, participants performed a lexical decision task in which they were presented with a priming word followed by a target to be judged as a word or non-word.…”

A test to identify judgement bias in mice

“…People that are in a negative affective state reveal a better memory of negative events, tend to focus their attention on the occurrence of negative events, and interpret ambiguous stimuli more negatively (negative judgement or interpretation bias) [2][3][4][5][6]. People suffering from anxiety disorders and/or depression have a more negative judgement bias than healthy controls [7].Based on the knowledge mentioned above, a negative judgement bias is understood as an indicator of a negative affective state [6,[8][9][10].…”

Don’t you Dare Look at me, or else: Negative and Aggressive Interpretation Bias, Callous Unemotional Traits and Type of Aggression

“…In order to measure an interpretation bias less obviously, an implicit measure of an aggressive interpretation bias may be more informative. Former studies using such an implicit measure of an interpretation bias have been performed within anxiety research [33]. However, studies using an implicit measure of aggression within juvenile participants varying in their levels of delinquency have not been performed yet.…”