A study was conducted to examine whether accessibility of self traits in terms of approach or avoidance influenced automatic attentional biases to the trait words. Experiment 1, with 27 participants, examined the relationship of trait accessibility and automatic attentional biases using emotional Stroop test. Accessibility was measured as reaction time for an evaluation task. Results revealed that high-accessibility words showed stronger attentional biases than medium ones, but low-accessibility words also showed similar attentional biases as the high. In light of past studies, this result was interpreted as indicating that words defined as low in accessibility indeed had self implications. Experiment 2, with 24 participants, examined self-descriptiveness of the low-accessibility words. Two experiments together suggested that automatic attentional biases to trait words were determined, not only by their accessibility, but also the self-descriptiveness of the traits in relation to the rater's actual self.

Key words: self, automatic attentional biases, approach-avoidance, accessibility, emotional Stroop test.