Effects of Training on Interpretation of Emotional Ambiguity

In four experiments we investigated whether interpretative biases found in anxious patients and high-trait anxious individuals can be induced by training in unselected volunteers. Repeated exposure to emotionally valenced (threatening) meanings of homographs during training was followed by relatively faster resolution of word fragments and faster lexical decisions for targets that matched the trained valence. Similar effects were found whether participants generated the meanings themselves, or verified a particular meaning of the homograph. Finally, comparison with a baseline condition confirmed that systematic exposure to threatening--but not non-threatening--resolutions of ambiguous words led to generally faster access times for congruent meanings, thus resembling the interpretative bias seen in anxiety states.