Anxiety and Attention: Is There an Attentional Bias for Positive Emotional Stimuli?
- 1 April 1997
- journal article
- review article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in The Journal of General Psychology
- Vol. 124 (2) , 194-210
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00221309709595517
Abstract
Empirical research has shown that anxiety is associated with a systematic bias in the cognitive system. Anxious individuals (clinically anxious patients and normal individuals with high-trait anxiety) are characterized by a pattern of selective processing that favors the encoding of threatening information. Is this attentional bias specific to threat-related information, or does it operate for positive emotional stimuli? The research directly connected with the existence of an attentional bias for threat in anxiety was examined.Keywords
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