Semantic and Prosodic Threat Processing in Trait Anxiety

The present study attempts to identify how trait anxiety, measured as worry-level, affects the processing of threatening speech. Two experiments using dichotic listening tasks were implemented; where participants had to identify sentences that convey threat through three different information channels: prosody-only, semantic-only and both semantic and prosody (congruent threat). We expected different ear advantages (left or right) depending on task demands, information type, and worry level. We used a full Bayesian approach for statistical modelling and analysis. Results indicate that when participants made delayed responses (Experiment 1), reaction times barely increased as a function of worry level, but under time pressure (Experiment 2) worry level induced clear decreases in reaction times. We explain these results in terms of multistep models of anxiety and language, concluding that present results mainly indicate effects threat aversion-related over-attention to threat, and that we do not provide enough evidence for supporting the integration of anxiety and language multiphasic models.