特质焦虑个体在高难度Stroop任务下的情绪启动效应

Emotional Priming Effects on Difficult Stroop Task for Trait Anxiety

通过问卷法,选取高特质焦虑和低特质焦虑个体作为本实验的研究对象,考察了正性、负性和中性三种情绪启动条件下,不同特质焦虑个体在完成高难度的Stroop任务时的差异。结果发现,相比低特质焦虑被试,高特质焦虑被试的Stroop效应量更大;两组被试在正性和负性情绪启动条件下的Stroop效应量均更大。表明高特质焦虑被试的认知抑制功能不足,正性和负性情绪启动对高特质焦虑和低特质焦虑被试完成高难度的Stroop任务均产生了阻碍作用。

＂Attentional control theory＂ assumes that anxiety impairs attention control, which is the core of executive function; this then canses anxious people to possibly have poor performance on executive functions. In contrast, others have found that anxiety does not have impacts on executive function. It is still an open question whether the cognition of anxious people is damaged. Anxious people are easily distracted by threat-related information and are impaired in their ability to regulate attention to the threatening stimuli. This attentional bias in favor of threat-related information is well established for both clinical anxiety and trait anxiety in the non-pathological range. Consequently, emotion stimulus may affect the cognition of anxious people more than normal participants. The present study investigates how different emotions affect the cognition inhibition for trait anxious participants. A 3 （emotion type： positive, negative, neutral） × 3 （task type： congruent, incongruent, irrelevant） × 2 （participant type： trait anxiety, normal） mixed experiment design was carried out. 144 pictures were selected from CAPS （48 positive, 48 negative, 48 neutral） to induce the participants＇ emotions; Stroop task was used to induce cognition inhibition. Fifty-seven participants selected from 1055 university students took part in the experiment; the students whose scores on the trait anxiety questionnaire exceed 57 for girls and 56 for boys were labeled as trait anxious participants, and the students whose scores on the trait anxiety questionnaire were below 30 were labeled as normal participants. We found that the Stroop effect of trait anxiety for anxious participants was larger than that of normal participants. The Stroop effect occurred after positive and negative emotions were larger than that after neutral emotions. The results illustrated that the cognition inhibition that was destroyed was impaired by positive and negative emotions for all the participants.