Cognitive content specificity in selective attention across four domains of maladjustment

Abstract

This research provided a rigorous examination of content-specific selective attention effects across the maladjustment domains of depression, anxiety, bulimia, and Type A behaviour. Study 1 utilized a self-referent endorsement task to obtain a set of empirically validated stimulus adjectives related to each maladjustment domain for use in the attentional paradigm in Study 2. Moreover, Study 1 provided some initial support for content-specificity proposals at the self-schema level. Self-descriptive ratings in Study 1 indicated that depressed individuals uniquely identified themselves with adjectives relating to hopelessness, loss, and failure. In contrast, the unique self-descriptive adjectives of anxious individuals centered on themes of social threat. Bulimics, in turn, endorsed unique self-descriptors relating to food and weight issues, whereas Type A self-descriptions were uniquely associated with achievement concerns. Content-specificity effects for selective attention were obtained in Study 2 for three of the four domains of interest (i.e. depression, anxiety, and bulimia). Using a modified probe-detection task, and very stringent criteria for group classification, it was found that individuals in each of these three groups selectively attended to personal adjectives that were hypothesized to be of specific relevance to their underlying cognitive concerns. Limited content-specificity effects were obtained for an incidental recognition measure, with only the depressed and bulimic groups showing enhanced memory performance for personal adjectives uniquely related to their dominant self-views. These findings are discussed in terms of various content-specificity distinctions across the four domains of maladjustment, including possible implications for the expression of differential behaviours for each domain.