anxiety

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

Some evidence suggests that acceptance-based approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) may be well-suited to geriatric generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The primary goal of this project was to determine whether ACT was feasible for this population. Seven older primary-care patients with GAD received 12 individual sessions of ACT; another 9 were treated with cognitive-behavioral therapy. No patients dropped out of ACT, and worry and depression improved.

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.