Glory to Arstotzka: exploring the effects of anxiety suppression on cognitive control through virtual reality
Date
2014
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Haverford College. Department of Psychology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
There is considerable evidence from the literature that emotion regulation and cognitive control draw on a common system of mental resources. Using a virtual reality manipulation to induce anxiety, this study investigated the effects of anxiety suppression on Stroop task performance and the ERN during EEG recording. Although several effects from the prior literature were replicated, the major hypotheses regarding emotion suppression were not supported; 1) that participants in a suppression condition would exhibit greater Stroop interference and decreased accuracy compared to control participants and participants in an anxiety without suppression condition, and 2) that participants in a suppression condition would exhibit attenuated ERNs relative to participants in the other conditions. In fact, although no significant results were found for either of these hypotheses, a trend in the opposite direction was found for the second hypothesis. Hopefully, future investigation will shed some light upon the potential implications of these findings.