Emotional stimuli reduce the attentional blink in sub-clinical anxious subjects

It has been documented that high anxious subjects process emotional stimuli in a very special way that sometimes has been characterized as an attentional bias toward them. Our main purpose here is to test whether emotional and neutral words would produce different magnitudes of the effect known as attentional blink (AB) on high-trait anxious subjects, but not on low-trait subjects. Participants had to identify the only white word (target 1) in a stream of black words displayed using the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) technique, and detect if a probe word (target 2) is present in the series. The words used as target 1 could be emotional or neutral. The results show that the emotional information reduces the magnitude of the AB only for the high-trait anxiety group. The implications of these results for both theoretical and practical fields are discussed in terms of the subjects high level of automaticity to process emotional information.