Phobics show poor recall of anxiety words

An experiment was conducted on recall bias between words relating to stimulus and response aspects of spider phobia. In contrast to the experiment of Watts & Coyle (1992) mixed lists were used. Whereas Watts & Coyle had found no bias of phobics between stimulus and response words, the present experiment found that phobics were relatively impaired in the recall of words relating to the anxiety response, compared with words relating to the stimulus features of spiders. This suggests a cognitive mechanism, not unlike repression, in which diminished recall of anxiety-related material helps to protect against the build-up of anxiety. Also, over the three times the word list was presented, phobics showed a non-significant trend to forget more stimulus words between lists. It is recommended that future studies on recall bias associated with anxiety should examine trial-to-trial changes as well as overall recall levels.