حافظه صریح و ضمنی، اضطراب صفت و سبک مقابله سرکوبگرانه

Individuals with high trait anxiety, low trait anxiety, and repressive coping style were compared on explicit and implicit memory for physical threat words, social threat words, positive words, and neutral words. The results replicate earlier findings to the effect that bias indexes correlate within memory type (implicit and explicit memory, respectively) but not within word category across memory type, suggesting that explicit and implicit memory bias represent two separate forms of emotional processing. Neither explicit nor implicit memory bias, however, was found to be associated with trait anxiety, or with repressive coping style—although an earlier finding of a negative association between anger/irritability and implicit memory bias was partly replicated. On the other hand, repressive coping style was found to be more associated with explicit than implicit memory performance in general (i.e. independently of the valence of words), which suggests the hypothesis that repressors, as compared with high and low trait-anxious individuals, have a general tendency to process information more at an explicit than an implicit level.

Most research on individual differences in emotional functioning rely on self-assessment scales. During the last decade, however, an increasing number of studies have focused on cognitive processing of emotional information by means of laboratory tasks like the emotional Stroop task (e.g. Williams, Mathews, & MacLeod, 1996) and tests of explicit and implicit memory bias for emotional information (Eysenck, 1997). An interesting question is to what extent these kinds of tasks can be used as reliable measures of individual differences in cognitive styles of information processing, and how these kinds of measures are related to self-report measures of emotion. The present study addresses the question whether explicit and implicit memory bias for emotional information represent different styles of emotional processing, and if these styles are associated with trait anxiety and repressive coping style.