Impacts of trait anxiety on visual working memory, as a function of task demand and situational stress.

Higher trait anxiety can impair cognitive functioning via attention, but relatively little is known about the impacts on visual working memory. These were investigated using previously validated visual feature binding tasks. In Study 1, participants' memory for visual features (shapes) and feature bindings (coloured shapes) was assessed.

Cognitive Appraisals Mediate Affective Reactivity in Affiliative Extraversion.

Extraversion is comprised of two main components of affiliation and agency. Affiliative and agentic extraversion have been found to predict positive activation in response to appetitive stimuli, and affiliative extraversion also predicts warmth-affection in response to affiliative stimuli. The aim of this study was to test whether cognitive appraisals could account for these personality-emotion relationships.

Bias in beliefs about the self is associated with depressive but not anxious mood.

Background: Biases in beliefs about the self are associated with psychopathology and depressive and anxious mood, but it is not clear if both negative and positive beliefs are associated with depression or anxiety. We examined these relationships in people who present with a wide range of depressive and anxious mood across diagnostic categories.

Methods: We probed positive and negative beliefs about the self with a task in which 74 female participants with either affective disorder (depression and/or anxiety), borderline personality disorder or no psychiatric history indicated the degree to which 60 self-related words was "like them" or "not like them".

Beliefs and emotions have different roles in generating attitudes toward providing personal help and state-sponsored help for people with a mental illness.

The aim of this study was to examine the role of emotions like pity and anger in mediating the relationship between beliefs about the controllability of a mental illness, and the willingness to help someone with a mental illness. In particular, we tested the hypothesis that the effects of beliefs about controllability on the willingness to provide personal help are mediated by the emotions of pity and anger, but that the effects of beliefs about controllability on the willingness to condone state-organised help were more direct, and not mediated by emotions. A between-groups design was employed to investigate the effects of manipulating controllability attributions via 3 hypothetical vignettes.