Autobiographical memory in angry and anxious individuals

Abstract

Recent studies have found that angry individuals are characterized by more pronounced attentional and interpretation biases toward threat than anxious individuals. The present study examined anger-related, anxiety-related, and neutral autobiographical memories in 35 angry participants, 33 anxious participants, and 29 non-angry/non-anxious, or healthy participants. Objective indices of autobiographical memories (i.e., retrieval latency, coding of specificity and affective tone) suggested that groups retrieved memories with similar properties. However, both angry and anxious participants rated their memories as less pleasant than healthy participants. These results indicate that memory biases are not part of the cognitive sequelae associated with anger and anxiety, although aspects of the appraisal of these personal memories are distorted.