The present study was designed to test the hypothesis that blood fearful and nonfearful individuals would be differentiated by their pattern of recall of schematic and non-schematic prose material. Blood fearful (n=36) and nonfearful (n=40) individuals were presented with five prose passages describing harm or injury. Nine sentences in each passage described events representative of the schema content of most individuals, whereas six sentences in each passage described events that are not representative of typical schema content. Participants read passages that either described themselves experiencing the situations or described themselves witnessing others in the situations and completed a free recall task in both immediate (i.e. 2 minutes) and delayed (i.e. one week) recall conditions. Results did not replicate studies from the cognitive psychology literature on which this study was based. Instead, participants who read passages describing themselves in these situations recalled the gist of the material more accurately than participants who read passages in which they witnessed another individual in the situation. Blood fearful participants recalled the affective tone of neutral passages less accurately than nonfearful participants. Results suggest that activation of schema content has little influence on memory performance, although assessing the affective tone of recalled material detected subtle differences in memory performance between fearful and nonfearful groups.

The present study examined the recall of material representative and non representative of schemata for social and evaluative situations. Socially anxious (n = 24) and nonanxious (n = 25) individuals were presented with three positively valenced and three negatively valenced prose passages describing common social and evaluative scenarios. Eight of the sentences in each passage described events representative of the schema content of most individuals, whereas three of the sentences in each passage described events that are not representative of typical schema content. Participants completed a free recall task in both immediate (i.e. 2 minutes) and delayed (i.e. one week) recall conditions. Although there were no group differences as a function of type of content (i.e. schematic, non-schematic), socially anxious individuals were less likely than nonanxious individuals to accurately recall the gist of passages containing negative information in the immediate recall condition. In all, this study provided little evidence for the influence of maladaptive schema content on memory for threatening material in anxious individuals, but it added to an increasingly large literature suggesting that some types of anxiety are associated with an avoidance of processing emotional material.