Trait anxiety, anxious mood, and threat detection
- 1 November 1995
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Cognition and Emotion
- Vol. 9 (6), 549-562
- https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939508408982
Abstract
Subjects were required to detect either an angry or a happy target face in a stimulus array of 12 photographs. It was found with neutral distractor faces that those high in trait anxiety detected angry faces faster than did low trait-anxious subjects, but the two groups did not differ in their speed of detection of happy targets. In addition, high trait-anxious subjects detected happy target faces slower than low trait-anxious subjects when the distractor faces were angry. Comparable findings were obtained whether or not there was anxious mood induction. It was concluded that high trait-anxious individuals have facilitated detection and processing of environmental threat relative to low trait-anxious subjects, which enhance performance when the target is threatening, but which impair performance when the distractors are threatening.Keywords
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