Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxiety

Abstract

The present study evaluated the status of mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals following incidental encoding of target words. In the first experiment, high trait anxiety individuals showed increased recall of threat-related information after an orienting task promoting lexical processing of target words. In a second experiment, both lexical and semantic orienting tasks were performed at study. In this experiment, anxious individuals displayed a moodcongruent recall bias only for target information processed at a lexical level. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.Empirical laboratory-based studies have demonstrated that clinically anxious individuals and people high in trait anxiety show a processing bias towards threat-related information. This bias is mainly evident in attentional and interpretative tasks (for reviews, see Logan & Goetsch, 1993;Wells & Matthews, 1994;Williams, Watts, MacLeod, & Mathews, 1997).As an example, in the modified Stroop task anxious individuals, compared to nonanxious controls, show increased interference in naming the colour in which threat-related information is presented (Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996). It is less clear, however, if anxious individuals display any mood-congruent explicit memory bias. 1 The available empirical evidence seems to suggest that there is no mood-congruent explicit memory bias for threat-related information in high trait anxiety individuals and in clinically anxious individuals (for reviews, see Dalgleish & Watts, 1990;Williams et al., 1997). This type of evidence is at variance with theories like Bower's (1981) network model, or Beck's model of anxiety (Beck, Rush, & Greenberg, 1985) which predicts the presence of a moodcongruent explicit memory bias in anxious individuals. For example, according to Beck's model, emotional dysfunctions co-occur with the activation of a cognitive schema biased toward mood-congruent information. The biased information processing induced by the activation of anxiety-related schema should bring about better encoding of threat-related information and as a consequence a mood-congruent explicit memory bias should be Correspondence should be addressed to Riccardo Russo,

Mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals is not a consequence of response bias

“…This difference was significant even when controlling for the false recall of items that had not been presented during study. These results support the view put forward by Russo, Fox, Bellinger, and Nguyen-Van-Tam (2001) that mood-congruent free recall bias in anxious individuals can be observed if the target material is encoded at a relatively shallow level. Moreover, contrary to Dowens and Calvo (2003), the current results show that the memory advantage for threat-related information in anxious individuals is not a consequence of response bias.…”

“…As predicted, Russo et al (2001) did find that high trait anxiety individuals showed greater recall of threat-related information compared to non-anxious individuals following an incidental lexical orienting task that promoted a minimal semantic encoding of targets. Moreover, when both semantic and lexical incidental orienting tasks were used, a mood-congruent free recall bias emerged only for items studied following the lexical orienting task.…”

“…However, Russo et al(2001) have challenged the view that anxious individuals do not show a mood-congruent recall bias. In reviewing studies on mood-congruent explicit memory bias in high trait anxiety individuals and in GAD patients, they noted that the learning of targets in these studies was generally intentional and followed tasks that promoted deep semantic encoding of target words (e.g., Becker, Roth, Andrich, & Margraf, 1999; Bradley, Mogg, & Williams, 1995).…”

“…In reviewing studies on mood-congruent explicit memory bias in high trait anxiety individuals and in GAD patients, they noted that the learning of targets in these studies was generally intentional and followed tasks that promoted deep semantic encoding of target words (e.g., Becker, Roth, Andrich, & Margraf, 1999; Bradley, Mogg, & Williams, 1995). Russo et al (2001) argued that the detection of mood-congruent memory bias for threat-related information is unlikely under these conditions. This is because intentional learning and semantic analysis of targets promotes a highly efficient encoding of target material, so that there is little scope for emotional factors to further influence the recall of affectively toned material.…”

“…More specifically, Russo et al (2001) predicted that when items are incidentally learned using relatively shallow orienting tasks (e.g., counting the number of syllables present in each target word), the minimal semantic analysis of threat-related targets should not divert non-anxious participants from focusing only on the orienting task. Conversely, anxious individuals should be diverted by the meaning of the threat-related stimuli, leading to a deepening of processing of these stimuli during learning.…”