Emotional processing in anxiety: disproportionate activation or an inability to inhibit?

[Truncated] Experiment 1 investigated the cognitive biases which have been demonstrated when anxious subjects process threatening material (e.g., MacLeod & Rutherford, 1992; MacLeod & Locke, 1994). The design of Experiment 1 was modelled closely on the study carried out by MacLeod and Locke. Undergraduate students divided into high and low trait anxiety groups completed an attentional deployment task under conditions of elevated (exam proximal) and lowered (exam distal) state anxiety. Two issues were of central interest. The first was whether high trait anxious subjects with elevated state anxiety would be disproportionately activated to respond to threatening stimuli. This pattern of results has been found by researchers using attentional deployment tasks and expressed in terms of anxious individuals having a selective encoding bias towards threatening material (e.g. Broadbent & Broadbent, 1988;MacLeod & Locke, 1994; Mogg, Mathews & Eysenck, 1992). For the purposes of this thesis this theoretical position was termed the disproportionate activation hypothesis.The second issue was whether anxious subjects, instead of being disproportionately activated to respond to threatening stimuli, are unable to inhibit threatening information from entering selective attention. This would normally occur through cognitive inhibition, a process identified in research using the negative priming paradigm (Tipper,1985). This new theoretical position was termed the inability to inhibit hypothesis.