Depth of processing and recall of threat material in fearful and nonfearful individuals

Abstract

Although many studies have examined the nature of memory distortions in anxious individuals, few have considered biases in specific memory processes, such as encoding or retrieval. To investigate whether the presentation of threat material facilitates encoding biases, spider fearful (n=63), blood fearful (n=73), and nonfearful (n=75) participants encoded spider related, blood related, and neutral words as a function of three levels of processing (i.e., structural, semantic, and self referent). Participants subsequently completed either a free recall or a recognition task. All participants demonstrated a partial depth of processing effect, such that they recalled more words encoded in the self referent condition than in the other two conditions, but groups did not differ in their recall of stimuli as a function of word type. Relative to participants in the other groups, spider fearful participants had fewer spider related intrusions in the recall condition, and they made fewer errors in responding to structural and semantic encoding questions when spider related words were presented. These results contribute to an increasingly large body of literature suggesting that anxious individuals are not characterized by a memory bias toward threat, and they raise the possibility that individuals with spider fears process threat-relevant information differently than individuals with blood fears.

Keywords:

• Depth of processing
• memory bias
• cognition
• fear
• spider
• blood

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Dr Thomas Tenhave for his statistical advice.

Notes

1. Watts and Sharrock (1984) provided evidence of the SPQ's factor structure and excellent concurrent validity. Marks and Mathews (1979) reported a 1-week test–retest reliability of .96 for the blood/injury scale using a clinical sample with a variety of phobias. The coefficient alphas for these scales obtained on similar spider fearful, blood fearful, and nonfearful samples were .88 and .85, respectively (Wenzel et al., 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kimberlee Zetocha∗

Portions of this paper were presented in Kimberlee Zetocha's senior honors thesis