Citation

Hertel PT, Mathews A, Peterson S, Kintner K. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 2003; 17(7): 775-784.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/acp.905

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Non-anxious college students first performed a semantic-judgement task that was designed to train either threat-related or threat-unrelated interpretations of threat-ambiguous homographs (e.g. mug). Next they performed an ostensibly separate transfer task of constructing personal mental images for single words, in a series that included new, threat-ambiguous homographs. In two experiments, the number of threat-related interpretations in the transfer task significantly increased following threat-related experience during the training phase, compared to other training conditions. We conclude that interpretive biases typically shown by anxious people can be established in non-anxious students in ways that generalize to novel tasks and materials. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Language: en