Biased cognitive operations in anxiety: Accessibility of information or assignment of processing priorities?

Abstract

There is considerable evidence that anxiety is associated with a cognitive bias favouring the processing of threat-related information. Bower's (1981) network model attributes this bias to the enhanced availability of mood congruent information from memory. However, certain experimental tasks do not reveal such a bias, when this effect is strongly predicted by the model. We note that all tasks which have demonstrated such mood congruent processing effects in anxious subjects share the requirement that these subjects must assign priorities to simultaneously available, and differentially valenced, alternative processing options. This feature has been consistently lacking in those paradigms we have found insensitive to the influence of anxiety. It is therefore suggested that anxiety is associated with the assignment of high processing priorities to threat-related options, rather than with the facilitated availability of threat-related information from memory. This proposal was experimentally tested using a lexical decision task, which is sensitive to the accessibility of information from memory, under conditions which either do or do not introduce the requirement to assign priorities to alternative processing options. The results indicate that the facilitated processing of threat related stimulus words, shown by generalised anxiety patients, does indeed appear to reflect a bias in the assignment of processing priorities, rather than the enhanced availability of this information from memory.