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WORD ASSOCIATION, ASSOCIATIVE STRUCTURE AND MANIFEST ANXIETY
Author(s) -
INNES JOHN M.
Publication year - 1971
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1971.tb02067.x
Subject(s) - psychology , associative property , association (psychology) , word association , stimulus (psychology) , anxiety , connotation , associative learning , personality , cognitive psychology , developmental psychology , social psychology , linguistics , psychiatry , mathematics , philosophy , psychoanalysis , pure mathematics , psychotherapist
Undergraduate subjects gave continuous associations to four stimulus words varying in connotation and abstractness. Subjects scoring high and low on the Manifest Anxiety Scale were selected; these subjects then gave continuous associations to their first five responses to each of the original stimulus words. A measure of inter‐item associative strength was obtained for each of the original stimuli. The highly anxious subjects' associations to the words with positive connotation were found to be more cohesive than these subjects' associations to the words with negative connotation. No such difference was found for low‐anxiety subjects nor was any difference found between associative structures for words varying in abstractness. The results were taken to suggest that the structure of associations to stimulus words may be an important variable in accounting for personality differences in word‐association behaviour.