EFFECTS OF ENCODING AND ANXIETY ON IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY PERFORMANCE

Normal subjects high and low in trait anxiety were presented with a series of threat-related and neutral words. Subjects encoded the words by either simply reading them or by using self-referenced imagery. Following an unrelated filler task, subjects were presented with an implicit memory task (word-fragment completion; Study 1) or with an explicit memory task (recall; Study 2). No differences were found between subjects high and low in trait anxiety on the explicit task. However, a different pattern of results was demonstrated for the high- and low-trait subjects following self-referenced imagery and read-only encoding for threat-related and neutral stimuli. This dissociation between explicit and implicit memory in anxiety supports the model proposed by Williams, Watts, MacLeod and Mathews (Cognitive psychology and emotional disorders, 1988). © 1991.