Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1998 Cognitive Avoidance in Phobia Merel Kindt1,3 and Jos F. Brosschot2 Accepted: January 22, 1998 It is suggested that anxious individuals would have a processing bias for threat only in the initial processing stage, whereas in the consecutive stages the more elaborate analysis of the stimulus would be inhibited. The purpose of this study was to investigate the stage in which the bias changed into avoidance and whether cognitive avoidance of threat is restricted to information that refers to the anxiety response as opposed to the threatening stimulus. Therefore, 37 spider phobics and 34 controls were administered a negative priming task and a free recall task, using threat words and neutral words, both divided into stimulus-related and response-related words. There was no indication of cognitive avoidance of the response-related threat words as assessed by the negative priming task. Recall findings indicated an incomplete memory bias in phobics, with a better recall of stimulus-related threat words instead of a worse recall of response-related threat words. This suggests a "passive cognitive avoidance" mechanism, which may still impede the processing of response-related information, crucial for the success of exposure therapy. INTRODUCTION There is ample evidence that anxiety is related to a cognitive bias to- ward threatening information, which facilitates the early detection of po- 1Department of Experimental Abnormal Psychology, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands. 2Department of Clinical Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 3To whom correspondence should be addressed at Maastricht University, Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Experimental Abnormal Psychology, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands, e-mail: MEREL.KINDT@DEP.UNIMAAS.NL. Fax: (+31) 43-3670968. 43 0882-2689/98/0300-0043$15.00/0 © 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation KEY WORDS: spider phobia; cognitive avoidance; negative priming; recall.