Abstract:
Negative implicit associations are thought to play a crucial role in psychological disorders for
example through the mechanism of worry. High-worriers have been found to show
generalized negative implicit associations with neutral words from worry-domains. The
current study aims to affect these negative implicit associations by means of an Affective
Simon Task training (AST-T). In this training, an association is trained by repeatedly pairing
worry-related words with positive response words, while the explicit instruction, of which the
participant is aware, is unrelated to the worry topic. The AST-T was tested with an active
training group and a control group in a student sample with subclinical symptoms of extensive
worry. The AST-T was successful in so far that participants responded faster to the newly
learned positive association in the training condition. This positive association however did
not transfer to an affective evaluation of worry-related words.
