5.3.4. Experiment 4

Although participant anxiety was not specifically assessed, participants in Experiments 1 and 3 were considered to be normal, non-anxious individuals, due to the voluntary participation procedure. Participants were also assumed to be experiencing no specific emotional state during Experiments 1 and 3. In Experiment 4 we measured the effect on attention to threatening stimuli of emotionally inducing normal participants.

The attentional bias effect in the classical emotional Stroop task is attributed most specifically to anxiety (e.g., Mathews & MacLeod, 2002). Nevertheless, several studies have noted that an emotional mood state or event can also temporarily bias attentional allocation. There is some evidence that emotional events or inductions can modify the sensibility or threshold of response to an emotional stimulus (e.g., MacLeod & Hagan, 1992; Parkinson & Rachman, 1981b; Riemann & McNally, 1995; Small, 1985; Small & Robins, 1988). Niedenthal and Setterlund (1994) noted that emotion or emotional state can increase the efficiency of perceiving emotionally congruent stimuli, including faster and more accurate detection, identification and classification. The purpose of Experiment 4 was to examine how an emotional event or context could influence attentional mechanisms related to processing emotional information.