Cognitive processes in socially anxious and repressor individuals

This thesis investigates the implicit and explicit cognitive processes of socially anxious and defensive persons. Eysenck's (1992, 97) model of anxiety proposed that trait-anxious people are fundamentally different to defensive individuals(repressors; REP) and this reflects how they interpret information, differing in their attentional and interpretive biases. He argued, that compared to low-anxious individuals (LA), both trait-anxious people and repressors appear to engage in different attentional styles and social behaviours to minimise their internal anxiety based on these interpretations. Furthermore, that although the behavioural styles of repressors and low-anxious individuals are similar, their implicit motivations were different in that repressors responded physiologically similar to trait anxious individual's implicit threat, whereas low-anxious individuals did not have this response. The notion being that both trait-anxious and repressors are anxious people who utilise different and opposite social behaviours to minimise their experience of anxiety. A further consideration for this thesis was that there are other models of anxiety that do not address the concept of defensiveness (repression) and distinguish only between trait-anxious and low-anxious individuals