There is considerable evidence in support of an attentional bias among clinically anxious individuals for threatening stimuli. However, a similar bias is not usually found in non-clinical anxious individuals and neither population has tended to show a response bias for mood-congruent information. We proposed that the measurement of anxiety in normals has previously been flawed due to questionnaires which do not accurately select pathological worry, the cognitive component of anxiety. First, we administered the Penn State Worry Questionnaire and selected only those with the most extreme high and low scores. At the time of testing, these subjects were given a state anxiety measure. From these scores, the high and low state anxiety within trait anxiety subjects were selected. With this selection procedure, we compared all high state anxious individuals to all low state anxious individuals. Our hypothesis was that, we would find significant differences between the high and low state within trait groups in a Directed Forgetting Paradigm. Directed forgetting was observed as a function of state within trait and the valence of the word on recall. Word fragment also showed a directed forgetting effect but no differences were seen for the worry groups. However, a secondary recognition procedure on the completed word fragments showed a bias as a function of worry group. The results are interpreted to suggest that worry has an effect on the availability episodic memory
