Selective inattention to anxiety-linked stimuli.

The term selective inattention as used here subsumes those phenomena whose primary function is the active blocking or attenuation of partially processed contents en route to conscious expression. Examples are anxiety-motivated forgetting or perceptual distortion and hypnotically induced negative hallucinations. Studies in the field of selective attention have typically been designed to explain what takes place in a task in which the subject is first instructed to attend to a particular stimulus and then to consciously execute that instruction as well as he can. The rejection of content in process is examined only sceondarily as a consequence of the acceptance of relevant information. In the present experiments and theorizing, the emphasis instead is on inhibitory operations that take place automatically, without conscious intent, in response to a potential anxiety reaction. Experiment 1 explored the interaction of anxiety-linked inattention with strength of a target stimulus. Three female subjects were programmed under hypnosis to respond posthypnotically in the On condition with prescribed degrees of anxiety when certain Blacky pictures popped into mind later ,t the end of experimental trials; in the Off conditionall pictures were to become neutral. With the three female subjects still under hypnosis, each of the loaded pictures was then paired with a four-letter work relevant to the individual's own version of what was happening in the picture. The waking recognition task, carried out with amnesia for the prior hypnotic programming, consisted of tachistoscopic exposure of loaded words and physically similar filler words at four durations within a baseline range of recognition accuracy from 50%--75% correct. The data yielded a curvilinear relationship in which the recognition of only the loaded words was significnatly lower in the On condition at the 60%--70% range of recognition accuracy but not at shorter or longer stimulus durations. Experiment 2, for which the prior hypnotic programming of the same three subjects was similar to Experiment 1, used an anagram approach to comparable four-letter words, except that pleasure-loaded words were introduced as a control along with filler words. Four durations of tachistoscopic exposure of the anagrams were used with each individual, and the major dependent variable was response latency measured in milliseconds. An independent measure of perceptual discriminability of the scrambled stimulus letters was obtained to isolate perceptual from cognitive aspects of the task. The results indicated that both low perceivability and high solvability increase the likelihood of response delays specifically in the presence of anxiety-linked stimuli. Experiment 3 was a nonhypnotic replication of Experiment 2, using 12 male and 13 female subjects. The potential affective loading of key anxiety and pleasure words was accomplished by structured scenarios for the Blacky pictures in which subjects were asked to place themselves as vividly as possible...