State anxiety and pathogen cues jointly promote social cognitive responses to pathogen threats

Abstract

Anxiety is an unpleasant, yet highly adaptive, aspect of human life. When coupled with the presence of specific situational threat cues, anxiety can promote functional threat-mitigating responses. Two experiments examined associations between anxiety and psychological responses that can reduce the threat of infectious pathogens. In each study, state anxiety was associated with heightened aversion toward possible sources of infectious disease (Study 1) and with prejudice toward a group heuristically associated with disease (Study 2), but only when the presence of situational pathogen cues was primed experimentally. State anxiety was unrelated to those outcomes in non-pathogen control priming conditions. These results highlight the joint roles that anxiety and situational pathogen cues may play in the avoidance of pathogens. At a broader level, findings provide insight into the processes by which general feelings of anxiety can promote functionally specific threat-management strategies.