Autobiographical memory in angry and anxious individuals

Recent studies have found that angry individuals are characterized by more pronounced attentional and interpretation biases toward threat than anxious individuals. The present study examined anger-related, anxiety-related, and neutral autobiographical memories in 35 angry participants, 33 anxious participants, and 29 non-angry/non-anxious, or healthy participants. Objective indices of autobiographical memories (i.e., retrieval latency, coding of specificity and affective tone) suggested that groups retrieved memories with similar properties. However, both angry and anxious participants rated their memories as less pleasant than healthy participants. These results indicate that memory biases are not part of the cognitive sequelae associated with anger and anxiety, although aspects of the appraisal of these personal memories are distorted.     

Interpretation biases in angry and anxious individuals

Although previous research has demonstrated many similarities between anxious and angry individuals, few studies have compared the degree and direction to which they exhibit cognitive biases in the presence of threat. The present study was a preliminary investigation of 28 angry participants, 30 anxious participants, and 26 non-angry/non-anxious participants who rated the likelihood of various explanations to account for ambiguous but potentially threatening events described in short prose passages. Angry participants rated the likelihood of positive explanations for ambiguous events lower than non-angry/non-anxious participants. Angry participants rated the likelihood of anger-related explanations higher than anxious and non-angry/non-anxious participants, and both angry and anxious participants rated anxiety-related explanations as being more likely than non-angry/non-anxious participants. Thus, both angry and anxious participants demonstrated a negative interpretation bias, although the bias was more pervasive in angry participants.     

Future-time gradients for performance in test anxious individuals.

It was assumed that highly anxious individuals should have a negative goal gradient for future performance and that this negative goal gradient should be reduced as the test-anxiety dispositions of the individuals decreased. The results for 392 grade school (6th) students showed, as expected, that (a) the highly anxious individuals (n = 55) tended to decrease the number of problems solved correctly as a future goal (task) approached in time and that (b) the slopes of the negative goal gradients decreased as the test-anxiety dispositions decreased. When number of problems attempted was the measure of performance (c) ther was a tendency for Ss of low anxiety (n = 101) to increase their performance as the goal approached.     

Gender differences in social support for socially anxious individuals

Given that social anxiety disorder is a common, chronic, debilitating disorder and socially anxious women appear to have different experiences related to social development and social support than men, it is essential that the gender differences in social anxiety and social support be understood. The present study examined perceived social support quantity and satisfaction in 23 women and 28 men seeking treatment for social anxiety disorder. Contrary to expectations, men and women did not differ on measures of social support. However, younger, unmarried women reported having smaller social support networks and less satisfaction with their social support networks than older, married women. Analyses of socially anxious men did not reveal such a pattern. The current study provides preliminary evidence that younger, single women have social support networks that are less satisfying than the social support networks of older, married women. Inclusion of social support modules within a cognitive behavioral treatment approach for social anxiety disorder may be warranted, particularly for young, unmarried women.     

Emotional processing of individuals high in psychopathic traits

One of the most important clinical features of psychopaths is their differential emotional response style. The present study examined the modulating effect of negative mood induction on the processing of emotional information and its relation to psychopathy. The sample of 105 participants were randomly assigned to two types of mood induction conditions (negative vs neutral) and viewed three types of visual stimuli (positive, neutral, negative). Psychopathic Personality Inventory‐R (PPI‐R; Lilienfeld & Andrews) was employed to measure their psychopathic traits. It was hypothesized that individuals high on PPI‐II (i.e., self‐centered impulsivity) would show greater response latencies to emotionally negative pictures when they were induced into a negative mood compared to individuals high on PPI‐I (i.e., fearless dominance). In general, individuals high on PPI‐II showed greater response latencies to emotionally negative pictures, but their responsivity did not vary as a function of mood manipulation or task demands. When controlling the influence of other PPI factors, PPI‐I predicted reaction time (RT) facilitation to positive pictures in general (i.e., faster RT), and when interacting with a negative mood induction, it predicted longer viewing time of and more difficulty disattending from positive pictures (i.e., slower RT). These results were discussed within emotional processing theory associated with psychopathy.     

Socially anxious individuals lack unintentional mimicry

So far, evidence for unskilled social behavior in high socially anxious individuals (HAs) is equivocal. One reason may be that shortcomings are often not directly observable. An important shortcoming would be a lack of unintentional mimicry because it communicates sympathy and rapport with the interaction partner. Therefore, we tested whether HAs show less unintentional mimicry of others. Twenty-nine HAs and 43 low socially anxious individuals (LAs) - all female - watched a virtual man (avatar) who displayed a fixed set of head movements while giving an opinionated speech. Four raters scored whether the participants mimicked the avatar's movements within 4 s. The results indicate that HAs did indeed mimic significantly less than LAs. Lacking such pro-social behavior, HAs may indeed be evaluated as less sympathetic by others, confirming their fears of being disliked.     

Disdain for anxious individuals as a function of mortality salience

Terror management theory research has shown that reminders of mortality tend to decrease liking for people who threaten one's worldview. In research, these worldview threats typically come from outgroup members, but they may also come from ingroup members who are negatively characterized. Presumably the negative characteristics of ingroup members threaten to diminish or undermine the worldview by their association with it. In this research we examine anxious individuals as potentially threatening ingroup members. We hypothesized that a brief contemplation of mortality would lead people to decrease their liking for anxious individuals associated with their ingroup. Study 1 showed that a mortality reminder led people to react more negatively to an anxious police liaison from their community, but not to a calm police liaison. Study 2 showed that a mortality reminder led people who strongly identified with university students to react more negatively to a fellow university student who was anxious, but not to a student who did not display anxiety. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evidence for retarded extinction of aversive learning in anxious children

The habituation to intense acoustic stimuli and the acquisition of differentially conditioned fear were assessed in 53 clinically anxious and 30 non-anxious control children and young adolescents. Anxious children tended to show larger electrodermal responses during habituation, but did not differ in blink startle latency or magnitude. After acquisition training, non-anxious children rated the CS+ as more fear provoking and arousing than the CS- whereas the ratings of anxious children did not differ. However, anxious children rated the CS+ as more fear provoking after extinction, a difference that was absent in non-anxious children. During extinction training, anxious children displayed larger blink magnitude facilitation during CS+ and a trend towards larger electrodermal responses, a tendency not seen in non-anxious children. These data suggest that extinction of fear learning is retarded in anxious children.     

Reappraisal mitigates overestimation of remembered pain in anxious individuals

Anxiety sensitivity, a trait characterised by fear of anxiety-related body sensations, has been linked to heightened attention to pain, appraising body sensations as threatening, and remembering threat-related information. We assessed whether individuals with greater anxiety sensitivity overestimate in remembering pain. We also assessed whether emotion regulation strategies that direct attention away from pain (distraction), or alter appraisals of pain (reappraisal), alleviate memory bias. Participants (N = 137) were randomly assigned to one of two emotion regulation conditions or to a control condition before taking part in a cold pressor task. Greater anxiety sensitivity was associated with overestimation in remembering pain. Engaging in reappraisal mitigated this memory bias but engaging in distraction did not. This is the first study to examine the relations among anxiety sensitivity, emotion regulation and memory for pain. The findings suggest that health-care practitioners can encourage reappraisal to promote more positive memories of procedural pain, particularly in patients high in anxiety sensitivity.     

Theory of mind ability in high socially anxious individuals

Background/Objectives: Research has demonstrated an association between social anxiety and impaired Theory of Mind (ToM). We assess whether ToM deficits occur even at a subclinical level of social anxiety and whether group differences in ToM performance are consistent with interpretation bias. We also explore potential reasons as to why socially anxious individuals may perform differently on ToM tasks.

Methods/Design: Undergraduate participants high (HSA; n?=?78) and low (LSA; n?=?35) in social anxiety completed a task of ToM decoding, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (MIE), a task of ToM reasoning, the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC), and a post-task questionnaire about their experience completing the MASC.

Results: HSAs performed marginally worse than LSAs on the MIE on neutrally valenced trials, and their pattern of errors may be consistent with a negative interpretation bias. HSAs and LSAs did not differ overall in performance on the MASC, though HSAs reported experiencing more confusion and distress than LSAs during the task, and this distress was associated with more MASC errors for HSA participants only. These results provide insight into the nature of ToM ability in socially anxious individuals and highlight important avenues for future research.     

Number line estimation in highly math‐anxious individuals

In this study, we aimed to investigate the difficulties highly math‐anxious individuals (HMA) may face when having to estimate a number's position in a number line task. Twenty‐four HMA and 24 low math‐anxiety (LMA) individuals were presented with four lines with endpoints 0–100, 0–1,000, 0–100,000, and 267–367 on a computer monitor on which they had to mark the correct position of target numbers using the mouse. Although no differences were found between groups in the frequency of their best‐fit model, which was linear for all lines, the analysis of slopes and intercepts for the linear model showed that the two groups differed in performance on the less familiar lines (267–367 and 0–100,000). Lower values for the slope and higher values for the intercept were found in the HMA group, suggesting that they tended to overestimate small numbers and underestimate large numbers on these non‐familiar lines. Percentage absolute error analyses confirmed that HMA individuals were less accurate than their LMA counterparts on these lines, although no group differences were found in response time. These results indicate that math anxiety is related to worse performance only in the less familiar and more difficult number line tasks. Therefore, our data challenge the idea that HMA individuals might have less precise numerical representations and support the anxiety–complexity effect posited by Ashcraft and colleagues.     

Differentiating between memory and interpretation biases in socially anxious and nonanxious individuals

Although individual cognitive biases toward threat in social anxiety are well established, few studies have examined the manner in which cognitive biases work in conjunction. In the present study, socially anxious ( n = 54 ) and nonanxious ( n = 58 ) individuals read 10 passages consisting of positive social or evaluative, negative social or evaluative, and neutral content and completed two cognitive tasks assessing memory of factual details and interpretation immediately and after 48 h. Socially anxious and nonanxious individuals did not differ in their memory for details presented in the passages. However, they made less positive and more negative interpretations of details included in the passages, particularly in positive passages that were self-relevant and particularly in positive passages after the delay. After including depression, state anxiety, and trait anxiety as covariates, biased interpretation of positive passages after the time delay remained significant, but biased interpretation of the self-relevant, positive passages did not. It is concluded that socially anxious individuals are characterized by accurate memory of threatening, factual material, but that they impose a biased interpretation upon that material, especially after some time has passed.     

Threat-related attentional bias in anxious and nonanxious individuals: a meta-analytic study

This meta-analysis of 172 studies (N = 2,263 anxious,N = 1,768 nonanxious) examined the boundary conditions of threat-related attentional biases in anxiety. Overall, the results show that the bias is reliably demonstrated with different experimental paradigms and under a variety of experimental conditions, but that it is only an effect size of d = 0.45. Although processes requiring conscious perception of threat contribute to the bias, a significant bias is also observed with stimuli outside awareness. The bias is of comparable magnitude across different types of anxious populations (individuals with different clinical disorders, high-anxious nonclinical individuals, anxious children and adults) and is not observed in nonanxious individuals. Empirical and clinical implications as well as future directions for research are discussed.     

A quantitative estimate of schema abnormality in socially anxious and non-anxious individuals

Although cognitive theories of anxiety suggest that anxious individuals are characterized by abnormal threat-relevant schemas, few empirical studies have estimated the nature of these cognitive structures using quantitative methods that lend themselves to inferential statistical analysis. In the present study, socially anxious (n = 55) and non-anxious (n = 62) participants completed 3 Q-Sort tasks to assess their knowledge of events that commonly occur in social or evaluative scenarios. Participants either sorted events according to how commonly they personally believe the events occur (i.e. "self" condition), or to how commonly they estimate that most people believe they occur (i.e. "other" condition). Participants' individual Q-Sorts were correlated with mean sorts obtained from a normative sample to obtain an estimate of schema abnormality, with lower correlations representing greater levels of abnormality. Relative to non-anxious participants, socially anxious participants' sorts were less strongly associated with sorts of the normative sample, particularly in the "self" condition, although secondary analyses suggest that some significant results might be explained, in part, by depression and experience with the scenarios. These results provide empirical support for the theoretical notion that threat-relevant self-schemas of anxious individuals are characterized by some degree of abnormality.     

Affective primes suppress attention bias to threat in socially anxious individuals

Anxious individuals show an attention bias towards threatening information. However, under conditions of sustained environmental threat this otherwise-present attention bias disappears. It remains unclear whether this suppression of attention bias can be caused by a transient activation of the fear system. In the present experiment, high socially anxious and low socially anxious individuals (HSA group, n=12; LSA group, n=12) performed a modified dot-probe task in which they were shown either a neutral or socially threatening prime word prior to each trial. EEG was collected and ERP components to the prime and faces displays were computed. HSA individuals showed an attention bias to threat after a neutral prime, but no attention bias after a threatening prime, demonstrating that suppression of attention bias can occur after a transient activation of the fear system. LSA individuals showed an opposite pattern: no evidence of a bias to threat with neutral primes but induction of an attention bias to threat following threatening primes. ERP results suggested differential processing of the prime and faces displays by HSA and LSA individuals. However, no group by prime interaction was found for any of ERP components.     

Objective vs subjective assessment of relaxation compliance among anxious individuals

Previous relaxation outcome research has lacked means to empirically determine how well Ss comply in home-practice assignments. This study reports on a relaxation assessment device (RAD) used by 21 adults who received 4 weeks of relaxation therapy for generalized anxiety. The RAD consists of a digital wristwatch, with a stopwatch function, surreptitiously placed within Ss' tape-players to monitor the amount of relaxation practice at home. Comparison of self-reported and RAD-determined practice found that Ss exaggerated their actual practice by an average overestimation of 126%. Only one-fourth of the Ss performed relaxation daily. Anxiety reductions were significantly correlated with RAD-determined but not with self-reported practice. Self-efficacy judgments significantly correlated with relaxation compliance only when percent overestimation in self-reports was controlled. The need for objective compliance measures in relaxation outcome studies was discussed.     

Interpreting neutral faces as threatening is a default mode for socially anxious individuals

The authors of the present study used an incidental learning paradigm to investigate the interpretation of neutral facial expressions in socially anxious individuals. Participants were asked to detect the location of a target following the presentation of a facial picture (i.e., cue). Unbeknownst to participants, the target location was contingent on the valence of the cue, and participants thus learned to associate different target locations with either positive or negative facial expressions. The authors subsequently used this learned association to assess interpretive biases. If socially anxious individuals interpret neutral faces in a negative manner, they should be faster to detect a target that appears in the location that is associated with negative face cues when the target is presented after a neutral face cue. The authors also assessed whether the anticipation of a feared situation influenced interpretive biases by comparing participants with and without a speech threat on this task. Results indicate that socially anxious individuals are characterized by an interpretive bias regardless of the threat manipulation. In contrast, nonanxious individuals interpreted neutral faces in a negative manner only when they were in the threat condition.     

Laboratory stressors in clinically anxious and non-anxious individuals: The moderating role of mindfulness

Objective

Mindfulness forms the basis for multiple clinical interventions and has been induced in laboratory settings. However, few studies have examined the effects of dispositional or trait mindfulness. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship of trait mindfulness to laboratory stressor responding across fear-based anxiety disorder and non-anxious samples. We hypothesized that trait mindfulness would be associated with diminished stressor responding above and beyond the contribution of anxiety and depression-related variables, and to a greater extent in high anxiety than low anxiety individuals.

Methods

90 participants, including 46 with anxiety disorders and 44 non-anxious controls, were assessed on hyperventilation and relaxation stressors. The relationship of trait mindfulness to stressor-related anxiety, negative affect, and duration was investigated in a hierarchical multiple regression model.

Results

Trait mindfulness predicted stressor responding in over 80% of measured outcomes, and predicted to a greater extent among high anxiety individuals in 50% of outcomes.

Conclusions

Trait mindfulness was associated with diminished responses to laboratory stressors in clinically anxious and non-anxious samples. Implications for emotion regulation and clinical interventions are discussed.     

Mindfulness and mind wandering: The protective effects of brief meditation in anxious individuals

Mind wandering can be costly, especially when we are engaged in attentionally demanding tasks. Preliminary studies suggest that mindfulness can be a promising antidote for mind wandering, albeit the evidence is mixed. To better understand the exact impact of mindfulness on mind wandering, we had a sample of highly anxious undergraduate students complete a sustained-attention task during which off-task thoughts including mind wandering were assessed. Participants were randomly assigned to a meditation or control condition, after which the sustained-attention task was repeated. In general, our results indicate that mindfulness training may only have protective effects on mind wandering for anxious individuals. Meditation prevented the increase of mind wandering over time and ameliorated performance disruption during off-task episodes. In addition, we found that the meditation intervention appeared to promote a switch of attentional focus from the internal to present-moment external world, suggesting important implications for treating worrying in anxious populations.