anxiety

Background and objectives

Identifying for whom and under what conditions a treatment is most effective is an essential step toward personalized medicine. The current study examined pre-treatment physiological and behavioral variables as predictors and moderators of outcome in a randomized clinical trial comparing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for anxiety disorders.

Methods

Anxiety is among the most common psychological symptoms, which is also the cause of most cognitive-behavioral disorders. Social anxiety disorder is one of these disorders. In this type of disorder, individuals are unable to have effective social communication and their interpersonal communication is impaired.

Objective

To examine whether an empirically and theoretically derived treatment combining mindfulness- and acceptance-based strategies with behavioral approaches would improve outcomes in GAD over an empirically-supported treatment.

Method

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) and the tendency to avoid emotions have both been identified as vulnerability factors for the development and maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, both cross-sectional and prospective research have provided evidence that emotional avoidance and AS interact to predict anxiety symptoms, such that AS may only be associated with anxiety-related pathology among those who exhibit a tendency to avoid their emotions.

Social anxiety tends to be examined from an intrapersonal perspective. Only recently have researchers started to explore social anxiety in the context of close relationships. In the current study, we investigated whether people with greater social anxiety respond defensively when the threat of being rejected by one׳s romantic partner becomes salient.

Anxiety disorders entail avoidance of feared situations and anxious experiences, which is believed to maintain anxiety pathology. It remains unclear if predominant coping styles, like avoidance, are similar across anxiety disorders or if each disorder has its own coping profile.