ABSTRACT

This study comes to continue the researches in the domain of preattentional biases in anxiety, started by the author (the role of domain-consonants distractors in the selective attention in anxiety). I started this study with the hypotesis that any change occured at the cognitive level of what we caii yet anxiety, will be reflected in the preattentional biases. To demonstrate this, I designed a subliminal associative learning (using a dichoptic procedare) to realize deconditioning to some negative domain-consonants words, on anxious non-clinical subjects. The results confirm my hypothesis, so 1 can conclude that the preattentional biases represents an objective and sensitive measure of any, at least, cognitive changes which occur in anxiety. In the near future, on the bases of results, I intend to elaborate a cognitive assessment battery, which will contend, the attentional searching task and some tasks developed from famous experiments on visual processing of emotional stimuli.

KEYWORDS: anxiety, attention, subliminal affective learning.