Department of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea, UK.
Memory. 2012;20(8):794-802. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2012.703676. Epub 2012 Aug 21.
Previous research has indicated that high anxious individuals exhibit a memory bias for self-threatening material. This memory bias may be partly due to an inhibitory deficit whereby there is a failure to inhibit self-threatening information leading to an increase in anxious thoughts and memories. To investigate this issue, high and low anxious participants chose 10 neutral and 10 negative personality traits that were self-descriptive. In Experiment 1, participants performed retrieval practice on the neutral traits, and in experiment 2 participants performed retrieval practice on the negative traits, while control participants completed an unrelated task. Participants then recalled all neutral and negative traits using a cued-recall procedure. Low anxious participants demonstrated a typical retrieval-induced forgetting effect (i.e., inhibition) for both types of trait, whereas high anxious participants failed to show the effect for negative traits but did so for neutral traits. The findings are discussed in terms of an inhibitory deficit in high anxious individuals.
先前的研究表明，高焦虑个体对自我威胁材料表现出记忆偏向。这种记忆偏向可能部分归因于抑制缺陷，即无法抑制自我威胁信息，导致焦虑思维和记忆增加。为了研究这个问题，高焦虑和低焦虑参与者分别选择了 10 个中性和 10 个负面的自我描述人格特质。在实验 1 中，参与者对中性特质进行了检索练习，而在实验 2 中，参与者对负面特质进行了检索练习，而对照组参与者则完成了一项不相关的任务。然后，参与者使用线索回忆程序回忆所有中性和负面特质。低焦虑参与者对两种类型的特质都表现出典型的检索诱导遗忘效应（即抑制），而高焦虑参与者对负面特质没有表现出这种效应，但对中性特质则表现出这种效应。研究结果从高焦虑个体的抑制缺陷方面进行了讨论。
