Dispositional Influences on Priming for Emotional Words

Abstract

Isolating a vulnerability towards depression is important for understanding the origins of the disorder and producing more effective treatment options. The negative affective priming (NAP) paradigm has been used to measure cognitive attentional biases characteristic of depression. Two accounts of NAP are deficient inhibition and facilitation of negative material. Both ignored repetition (IgnRep) and attended repetition (AttRep) trials were included to test facilitation and inhibition of negative words, respectively. To dissociate the effects of word valence, 93 female undergraduate students at SFU completed a modified NAP task that included neutral words. NEO-PI-R depression (N3) and positive emotions (E6) subscales were used to better isolate depressed trait from state influences. Results showed that all emotional words had a facilitation effect, regardless of valence. Importantly, an inability to ignore negative words did not characterize depressed trait, as previously reported. A differential effect of valence was found in the AttRep condition but was the reverse of previous findings, with facilitation for positive words. This may represent a subconscious compensatory effort to counteract the effects of a depressed trait, as well as a dominant threat detection system in the positive trait. These results are more consistent with an emotion regulation account of negative priming than the inhibitory account typically used in the NAP literature.