Anxiety and defensiveness: individual differences in affective startle modulation |
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| Authors: | Richard O Temple III" target="_blank">Edwin W CookIII |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 415 Campbell Hall, 1530 3rd Avenue South, Birmingham, AL, 35294-1170, UK;(2) The Transitional Learning Center, 1528 Postoffice Street, Galveston, TX 77550, USA |
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| Abstract: | Anxious individuals selectively attend to threatening information, and defensiveness may influence the experience and expression
of anxiety. Fifty-eight undergraduates scoring high and low on measures of anxiety and defensiveness viewed pleasant, neutral,
and unpleasant pictures. Acoustic startle probes were presented 60, 240, or 2,000 ms after picture onset. At 60 ms and 240 ms,
repressors (low anxiety, high defensiveness) showed weaker blinks during both pleasant and unpleasant compared to neutral
pictures, suggesting enhanced early attention to affective stimuli, regardless of valence. At 2,000 ms, high-anxious but not
low anxious participants showed potentiated startle responses during unpleasant compared to pleasant pictures. Although this
result replicated previous research on anxiety and valence modulation of startle, exploratory analyses suggested that the
valence effect was restricted to trait anxious individuals tending toward a defensive coping style. Across probe conditions,
defensiveness was associated with heightened startle reactivity independent of self-reported anxiety and foreground stimulus
characteristics.
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| Keywords: | Startle Anxiety Defensiveness Repression |
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