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Taylor & Francis (Routledge), Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 6(27), p. 715-724

DOI: 10.1080/20445911.2015.1027210

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Individual differences in emotional reactivity moderate the strength of the relationship between attentional and implicit-memory biases towards threat-related stimuli

Journal article published in 2015 by Pawel J. Matusz ORCID, Jakub Traczyk, Agata Sobkow, Jan Strelau
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

The study investigated whether the strength of the relationship between attentional and implicit-memory biases for threat-related material can be moderated by individual differences in temperament and personality. A spatial cueing task, where task-irrelevant angry, happy, and neutral faces acted as spatial cues preceding a target, was immediately followed by an unexpected “old/new” task involving previously presented faces. Temperament-based emotional reactivity (one‘s typical response strength to emotional stimuli) predicted improved memory performance for angry faces in the “old/new” task. Critically, the relationship between the attentional bias toward threat (indexed by a cue validity index, i.e., a difference in response times on trials where cues with angry expression were presented in the same versus different location to the subsequent target) and enhanced implicit-memory for previously presented task-irrelevant threat-related information was found to be moderated by emotional reactivity. The current findings provide the first evidence that temperament traits can offer novel insights into the mechanisms enhancing cognitive biases towards threat in the typical population.