Perceptual and electroencephalographic registration of masked emotional words in defensiveness: An exploratory study

Repressors vs. low- and high-anxious coping styles: EEG differences during a modified version of the emotional Stroop task

“…In the original sample of 470 participants two participants met the criteria for high defensive/high-anxious, therefore we were not able to include this group in the analysis. We excluded men from this study in order to stay within the framework of Tomarken and Davidson's (1994) study and because prior findings by Kline et al (1998b) suggest hemispheric asymmetries between men and women. In addition, due to recent evidence that the sex of the experimenter can also contribute to hemispheric differences between the sexes when defensive coping-a characteristic of repressors -is utilized (Kline et al, 2002), we decided to only recruit women and have female experimenters in order to minimize the already complex data analysis for this study.…”

“…Especially relevant to the repressive coping research is the theoretical conceptualization of "repressors" by Weinberger and his colleagues (Weinberger and Davidson, 1994;Weinberger and Schwartz, 1990) along with the electroencephalographic (EEG) findings of Kline et al (1998b).…”

“…Thus, repressors exhibit a combination of (perceived) low-anxiety and high defensiveness (Bonanno et al, 1991). Repressors cope with external and internal stimuli by increased unconscious processing of emotion in the service of inhibition of threatening material (Kline et al, 1998b;Langens and Mörth, 2003). Weinberger et al (1979) suggested that repressors have a "heighted recognition threshold" for anxiety provoking stimuli.…”

“…When repressors are not given the opportunity to use the ongoing avoidant, attention switching strategy, such as during a word recognition task, they showed decreased posterior alpha power following registration of emotional words in comparison to neutral words (Kline et al, 1998b). When word trials contained sexually taboo words, which most significantly affected repressor task performance, alpha power (7.5-13.45 Hz) markedly decreased in the right hemisphere (Kline, Schwartz, et al).…”

Electroencephalographic Registration of Low Concentrations of Isoamyl Acetate

“…Awareness and perception without awareness are inferences based on task performance. The magnitude of a neurophysiological response to a stimulus can vary as a function of selective attention (Naatanen, & Picton, 1987), subjective probability and expectancy (Coles, Gratton, & Fabiani, 1990), and personality (Kline et al, 1998;Kline, Schwartz, Fitzpatrick, & Hendricks, 1993), to name a few. These conclusions have obviously been made in the context of controlled experimentation with fixed variables.…”