Psychology
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Item THE EFFECT OF INTOLERANCE OF UNCERTAINTY ON ATTENTION BIASES AS INDICATED BY PERFORMANCE ON THE EMOTIONAL STROOP AND DOT-PROBE TASK(2014) Norwood, Earta; MacPherson, Laura; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anxiety disorders affect about 28.8% of the United States population at some time in their lifetime. Current theoretical models of anxiety disorders include cognitive constructs that are believed to play a crucial role in the etiology and maintenance of these disorders. Intolerance of uncertainty is one such cognitive construct, and it has been defined as a negative emotional, cognitive, or behavioral response to uncertain situations and events. Intolerance of uncertainty results in selective encoding and interpretation of information, such that people with high intolerance of uncertainty pay more attention to uncertain stimuli, go through greater elaborative encoding of uncertain information, have enhanced recollection of uncertain stimuli, and have a greater tendency to interpret such stimuli as threatening. Studies investigating processing biases in intolerance of uncertainty have used verbal-linguistic stimuli and have assessed biases during the interpretive and elaborative phase of information processing. The current study investigates intolerance of uncertainty as a moderator in the relationship between anxiety and information processing biases. Attention biases were assessed with the emotional Stroop task (using neutral words, threatening words, and words denoting uncertainty), and the dot-probe task (using photographs displaying faces with neutral or fearful expression). Contrary to our hypothesis, IU was not a moderator in the relationship between anxiety and automatic information processing biases. Additionally, we found no evidence of a relationship between IU and reaction times in the emotional Stroop and dot-probe task. Unexpectedly, the current study did not demonstrate a relationship between anxiety and automatic information processing biases.Item THE EFFECT OF ANXIETY ON REPETITION PRIMING FOR VISUAL STIMULI(2011) Norwood, Earta; Smith, Barry; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anxiety strongly influences a person's experience by affecting, among others, cognition and learning. Theoretical models of anxiety indicate that the level of anxiety experienced by an individual affects how they analyze threat-related incoming information. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between anxiety and the difference in the time it takes to make simple decisions about repeatedly presented photographs. The study included 71 participants who completed a task based on the repetition priming effect. The photographs used for this task depicted human faces displaying a happy or fearful expression. The participants were presented twice with each photograph and were asked to indicate the gender of the face presented in the photograph. The outcome measure was the time that it took for each participant to react to the presented photographs. The findings indicate that anxiety, worry, and intolerance of uncertainty affect the perception of visual stimuli, such that people with higher anxiety, worry, or intolerance of uncertainty react differently to such stimuli. People with a history of a DSM-IV anxiety disorder diagnosis reacted faster to visual stimuli relative to healthy controls. The differences in information processing between people with high and low anxiety seem to provide support for cognitive theories that explain anxiety as the result of lack of habituation due to excessive avoidance and those that explain anxiety as the result of disproportionate allocation of cognitive resources.