anxiety

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.

The purpose of this systematic review was to examine the efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) applied to the treatment of social anxiety disorder (SAD). An exhaustive search was carried out in different databases. After the application of a number of inclusion and exclusion criteria, a total of eight studies conducted between 2005 and 2016 were obtained and then reviewed. In three of these studies, ACT proved efficacious in reducing phobic symptoms and psychological inflexibility. The remaining five, which employed randomized controlled trial design, showed that ACT and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) produce similar improvements both at post-treatment and during the follow-up.

Despite the central status of avoidance in explaining the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders, surprisingly little behavioral research has been conducted on human avoidance. In the present paper, first we provide a brief review of the empirical literature on avoidance. Next, we describe the implications of research on derived relational responding and the transformation of functions for a contemporary behavioral account of avoidance, before providing several illustrative research examples of laboratory-based analogues of key clinical treatment processes. Finally, we suggest some challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for behavioral research on anxiety and avoidance.

Fear generalization, in which conditioned fear responses generalize or spread to related stimuli, is a defining feature of anxiety disorders. The behavioral consequences of maladaptive fear generalization are that aversive experiences with one stimulus or event may lead one to regard other cues or situations as potential threats that should be avoided, despite variations in physical form. Theoretical and empirical interest in the generalization of conditioned learning dates to the earliest research on classical conditioning in nonhumans. Recently, there has been renewed focus on fear generalization in humans due in part to its explanatory power in characterizing disorders of fear and anxiety.

Social anxiety in adolescence can have severe consequences including underachievement and school drop-out, psychopathology, and substance use disorders. The development of social anxiety in adolescents is a complex and poorly understood process. Temperamental predispositions such as behavioural inhibition are significant risk factors but the specific path leading from behavioural inhibition to social anxiety remains unclear. One potential pathway is that temperament leads to social anxiety through learned self-regulation strategies and cognitive predispositions, a hypothesis that has not yet been investigated in adolescents.