E-ISSN : 2733-4538
This is a study on the effect of self-focused attention on anxiety. Subjects in this study consisted of 22 patients who were receiving treatment in two university hospitals and one private psychiatric clinic under the diagnosis of panic disorder or generalized anxiety disorder : 26 university students with high anxiety level, and 24 university students with low anxiety level. In order to show the effect of self-focused attention on the cognitive aspect of anxiety, the effect of self-focused attention on the cognitive failure was investigated as a preliminary measure. Results revealed that the cognitive failure during the state of anxiety was more closely related to self-attention than anxiety itself. Then the effect of self-attention to the selective attention of the highly anxious group was studied. The modified Stroop test was used to evaluate the patterns of selective attention which were measured by reaction time and the number of errors in each experimental condition The experimental conditions consisted of four types: (i) words of physical threats (ii) words of social threats (ⅲ) neutral words and (iv) positive words. Because of the age difference between the patient groups and student groups and the correlation between age and dependent variables, covariance analysis was conducted as a statistical procedure in which the age was the covariate variable. Results show that the selective attention of the highly anxious group is not confined to negative words but to all the self-related words regardless of its content. In other words, it seems that the self-focused attention of the highly anxious person activates the negative cognition in memory and it acts as a mediating variable in information processing.