Delayed Responses to Threatening Speech as a Function of Behavioural Inhibition [post]

Simon Busch Moreno, Li Zirong, Angela Gorgol, Christina Ng, Smekal Vojtech, Ash Zhang, David Vinson
2021 unpublished
The present study investigates how trait anxiety affects speech processing, and whether anxiety has different processing consequences depending on speech informational properties. Participants listened to sentences in a go/no-go task where they were asked to respond to threat, which could be present in semantics, prosody or both. In one experiment they were asked to attend to prosody only and ignore semantics, and in the other, attend to semantics and ignore prosody. Trait anxiety was measured
more » ... sychometrically using a behavioural inhibition scale questionnaire. In both studies, increased trait anxiety had substantial effects in slowing reaction times, but did not affect accuracy We suggest that increased anxiety induces participants to over-engage with threat, which is reflected in slower but not much less accurate responses. We adduce that phasic models of emotional language processing and anxiety can be bridged together by proposing a specific mechanism disrupting late phase processing, where orientation and/or deliberation processes occur. We propose that verbal repetitive thinking, as associated with anxious rumination and worry, can fulfil this disruptive role.
doi:10.31234/osf.io/kmga2 fatcat:4ycfaaqhdza7liqmu5qsyimpsa