Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring Reaction Time Differences To Aggression Words As A Function Of Attachment Related Avoidance And Anxiety, Stephanie L. Johnson

ETD Archive

A previous study using an Emotional Stroop task (EST) and a Visual Lexical Decision task (VLDT) determined that threat-related subliminal primes (for participantshigh in attachment anxiety) 1) heightened accessibility of representations of attachment figures, and 2) inhibited attachment representations (high attachment avoidance) whenthe threat prime was the word separation. The current study also used both tasks (EST and VLDT) to explore differences in reaction time (RT) without a subliminal prime for neutral, physical, and relational aggressive words as a function of attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety. Results showed that for the EST, higher avoidance reflected slower RTs to physical aggression …