The effect of positive mood on state anxiety and interpretation bias in high trait anxious individuals

Abstract

Interpretation bias is a tendency to draw inferences towards positive or negative information consistently (Hirsch et al., 2016). Robust evidence has demonstrated a strong correlation between negative interpretations and anxiety. Meanwhile, some studies found that highly anxious individuals generated positive and negative interpretations but only selected the negative ones. The information processing model of anxiety (Beck & Clark, 1997) suggested that highly anxious individuals tend to prioritize attentional resources on negative information. Another cognitive model of selective processing in anxiety (Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998) suggested that both positive and negative meanings compete for attentional resources by looking for a match in their corresponding evaluation system, and state anxiety enhances the resulting output of threat meanings. Do high trait anxiety individuals always focus on the negative aspects and ignore the positive aspects of an ambiguous scenario under every emotional state? According to broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2004), positive emotions can broaden individual’s scope of attention and undo negative emotions. Due to limited literature about the influence of position emotion on interpretation bias, the present study aims to examine whether, consistent with broaden-and-build theory, positive mood state will reduce interpretation bias for threat and state anxiety among high trait anxiety individuals.