Five experiments are reported showing that the interpretation of personally relevant emotional information can be modified by systematic exposure to congruent exemplars. Participants were induced to interpret ambiguous information in a relatively threatening or a benign way. Comparison with a baseline condition suggested that negative and positive induction had similar but opposing effects. Induction of an interpretative bias did not require active generation of personally relevant meanings, but such active processing was necessary before state anxiety changed in parallel with the induced interpretative bias.These findings provide evidence consistent with a causal link between the deployment of interpretative bias and anxiety and reveal something of the processes underlying this association."You wake with a start in the middle of the night thinking you heard a noise, but all is quiet. What do you suppose woke you up?" Butler and Mathews (1983, p. 54) used this and other scenarios to test the idea, first suggested by Beck (1976), that anxious patients are more likely than others to think of the worst interpretation of an ambiguous event. As expected, anxiety-disordered patients were more likely to endorse a threatening interpretation of the event (e.g., an intruder is in the house) than were normal control participants. Similar studies have subsequently confirmed that agoraphobic and panic-disordered patients are relatively more likely to report the more threatening of several possible meanings of ambiguous information (Clark et al.,

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The hypothesis that mental imagery is more likely to elicit emotion than verbal processing of the same material was investigated in two studies. Participants saw a series of pictures, each accompanied by a word, designed to yield a negative or benign meaning when combined. Participants were either free to combine the picture and word as they wished (Experiment 1) or instructed to integrate them using either a descriptive sentence or a mental image (Experiment 2). Emotional response was consistently greater following imagery than after producing a sentence. Experiment 2 also demonstrated the causal effect of imagery on emotion and evaluative learning. Additional participants in Experiment 2 described aloud their images/sentences. Independent ratings of descriptions indicated that, as well as being more emotional, images differed from sentences elicited by identical cues by greater similarity to memories, and greater involvement of sensations and specific events. Results support the hypothesis that imagery evokes stronger affective responses than does verbal processing, perhaps because of sensitivity of emotional brain regions to imagery, the similarity of imagery to perception, and to autobiographical episodes.

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