Discrimination of threat cues without awareness in anxiety states.

Investigated whether differences in the way that information related to danger is processed depend on voluntary attention to threat cues or on involuntary processes that may occur in the absence of awareness. 16 Ss (mean age 30.9 yrs) complaining of generalized anxiety states and 16 nonanxious matched controls (mean age 32.6 yrs) completed the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Beck Depression Inventory, and the synonyms section of the Mill Hill Vocabulary Scale. Ss then shadowed neutral passages in a dichotic listening task while simultaneously being exposed to threat- or non-threat-related words in the unattended channel. Anxious Ss were slower in performing a simultaneous reaction time (RT) task when the unattended words were threatening in content, although neither group could report on or recognize the words to which they had been exposed. This finding suggests that threat cues are processed differently by anxious and nonanxious individuals and that this effect depends on a preattentive bias operating prior to awareness. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)