Abstract
Emotional information processing biases in sociotropic individuals. Recent experimental work suggests that individuals high on sociotropy may show selective processing biases among interpersonally oriented or self-referent emotional data when the appropriate latent negative self-schemas are activated. In the present study we tested this "congruent processing hypothesis" using individuals high and low in sociotropy who were subjected to two affective imaginal priming conditions, one that was congruent with the vulnerability of the sociotropic (a rejection scenario) and one that was not (a failure scenario). The tests used were lexical decision and self-descriptiveness rating tasks with positive and negative interpersonally oriented stimuli. The results of the self-descriptiveness rating task supported the congruency hypothesis, but those of the lexical decision task did not. Specifically, individuals high on sociotropy endorsed significantly more negative adjectives as self-descriptive following rejection priming than individuals low on sociotropy; no such difference was found following failure priming. The implications of these results for cognitive vulnerability to depression are discussed.
