anxiety

Empirical research studies have revealed the relations between experiential avoidance and the tendency to suffer from social anxiety among adult samples. In addition, interpersonal problems can be risk factors for mental health problems or maladjustment to school; however, the links have not been investigated among early adolescents. In this study, we examined the reciprocal relations between experiential avoidance and social anxiety tendency among junior high school students. The responses of 660 Japanese junior high school students (313 boys and 347 girls, seventh to ninth grade, aged 12–15 years) to the Japanese short version of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth and the Japanese version of the Social Anxiety Scale for Adolescents were collected at three time-points with approximately four-month intervals between them. Cross-lagged path analyses revealed that a prior tendency for social anxiety tendency positively later affected a slight increase in experiential avoidance at each time-point. In contrast, experiential avoidance did not significantly predict a later social anxiety tendency at any time-points. Therefore, the findings indicate that a social anxiety tendency can be a risk factor for enhanced experiential avoidance among early adolescents. These results can provide useful information for designing prevention and intervention plans for acceptance and commitment therapy for youths.

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Anxiety happens. It's not a choice. And attempts to "manage" your thoughts or "get rid" of worry, fear, and panic can leave you feeling frustrated and powerless. But you can take back your life from anxiety without controlling anxious thoughts and feelings. You can stop avoiding anxiety and start showing up to your life. This book will get you started, using a revolutionary new approach called acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT. The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety has one purpose: to help you live better, more fully, more richly. Your life is calling on you to make that choice, and the skills in this workbook can help you make it happen. Find out how your mind can trap you, keeping you stuck and struggling in anxiety and fear. Learn to nurture your capacity for acceptance, mindfulness, kindness, and compassion. Use these qualities to shift your focus away from anxiety and onto what you really want your life to be about. As you do, your life will get bigger as your anxious suffering gets smaller. No matter what kind of anxiety problem you're struggling with, this workbook can guide you toward a more vibrant and purposeful life. This workbook comes with a CD that includes a full-length audio guided meditation and electronic copies of the worksheets that appear inside the book.

The tendency for anxious individuals to selectively attend to threatening information is believed to cause and exacerbate anxious emotional responding in a self-perpetuating cycle. The present study sought to examine the relation between differential interoceptive conditioning using carbon dioxide inhalation as a panicogenic unconditioned stimulus (US) and the development of Stroop color-naming interference to various non-word conditioned stimuli (CSs). Healthy university students (N = 27) underwent the assessment of color-naming interference to reinforced CS+ and non-reinforced CS- non-words prior to and following differential fear conditioning. Participants showed greater magnitude electrodermal and verbal-evaluative responses to the CS+ over the CS- non-word following interoceptive conditioning, and demonstrated the expected slower color-naming latencies to the CS+ compared to the CS- non-word from baseline to post-conditioning. We discuss the relation between fear learning and the emergence of attentional bias for threat to further understand the maintenance of anxiety disorders.