Download or read book Is Attentional Bias Towards Threat a Hallmark of Chronic Worry written by Jennifer Leigh Preston and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: Research investigating adults with anxiety disorders has typically found that these disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), are associated with an attentional bias toward threatening or negative information. However, some research has demonstrated that not all chronic worriers show an attentional bias toward threat. It is currently unclear why a number of chronic worriers do not show this attentional threat bias, or how individuals who do not show the bias are different from those who do. The current study was designed to clarify why some chronic worriers do not show an attentional threat bias. Participants were undergraduate students recruited based on their level of worry. Recruitment focused on individuals with high levels of worry, but a subsample of individuals with lower worry levels was also included. Attentional threat bias was measured using one type of computerized dot probe paradigm called a probe discrimination task (PDT). Several psychological variables, including depression, social anxiety, and attentional control, were measured to investigate the nature of their relationship with attentional bias. Because minimal research has investigated the reliability of PDTs over time, the reliability of the PDT over a two-week period was examined. Results indicated that the attentional threat bias scores obtained from the PDT were unreliable over time and within each testing session. In addition, no significant group differences in attentional bias scores were observed between individuals with or without GAD. However, chronic worriers displayed significantly greater attentional bias towards threat than individuals with lower levels of worry. None of the psychological variables measured in the study were consistently related to attentional bias scores. No significant predictors of the presence versus absence of attentional threat bias emerged. The absence of significant differences in attentional bias between individuals with and without GAD is inconsistent with most previous research, but the observed differences in attentional threat bias between groups based on worry level is consistent with previous findings. The current study's findings regarding the reliability of attentional bias scores are consistent with the one published study which found attentional bias scores to be unreliable over time.
Download or read book Digital Mental Health written by Ives Cavalcante Passos and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book focuses on potential, limitations, and recommendations for the digital mental health landscape. Authors synthesize existing literature on the validity of digital health technologies, including smartphones apps, sensors, chatbots and telepsychiatry for mental health disorders. They also note that collecting real-time biological information is usually better than just collect filled-in forms, and that will also mitigate problems related to recall bias in clinical appointments. Limitations such as confidentiality, engagement and retention rates are moreover discussed. Presented in fifteen chapters, the work addresses the following questions: may smartphones and sensors provide more accurate information about patients’ symptoms between clinical appointments, which in turn avoid recall bias? Is there evidence that digital phenotyping could help in clinical decisions in mental health? Is there scientific evidence to support the use of mobile interventions in mental health? Digital Mental Health will help clinicians and researchers, especially psychiatrists and psychologists, to define measures and to determine how to test apps or usefulness, feasibility and efficacy in order to develop a consensus about reliability. These professionals will be armed with the latest evidence as well as prepared to a new age of mental health.
Download or read book Developmental Psychopathology Developmental Neuroscience written by Dante Cicchetti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 1084 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete reference of biological bases for psychopathology at any age Developmental Psychopathology is a four-volume compendium of the most complete and current research on every aspect of the field. Volume Two: Developmental Neuroscience focuses on the biological basis of psychopathology at each life stage, from nutritional deficiencies to genetics to functional brain development to evolutionary perspectives and more. Now in its third edition, this comprehensive reference has been fully updated to better reflect the current state of the field, and detail the newest findings made possible by advances in technology and neuroscience. Contributions from expert researchers and clinicians provide insight into brain development, molecular genetics methods, neurogenics approaches to pathway mapping, structural neuroimaging, and much more, including targeted discussions of specific disorders. Advances in developmental psychopathology have burgeoned since the 2006 publication of the second edition, and keeping up on the latest findings in multiple avenues of investigation can be burdensome to the busy professional. This series solves the problem by collecting the information into one place, with a logical organization designed for easy reference. Consider evolutionary perspectives in developmental psychopathology Explore typical and atypical brain development across the life span Examine the latest findings on stress, schizophrenia, anxiety, and more Learn how genetics are related to psychopathology at different life stages The complexity of a field as diverse as developmental psychopathology deepens with each emerging theory, especially with consideration of the rapid pace of neuroscience advancement and genetic discovery. Developmental Psychopathology Volume Two: Developmental Neuroscience provides an invaluable resource by compiling the latest information into a cohesive, broad-reaching reference.
Download or read book The Impact of Engaging in Verbal Versus Imagery based Worry on Attentional Processing written by Marc Williams and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generalised anxiety disorder is characterised by excessive, uncontrollable, worry. The current study tested the idea that the verbal nature of worry in GAD, due to its abstract nature, might self-maintain by generating a widespread attentional bias for threat. It was hypothesised that verbal worry would generate more of an attentional bias for threat than imagery-based worry which, due to its more concrete nature, was hypothesised to produce attentional bias only for stimuli specifically relating to worry content. Verbal worry was also hypothesised to give rise to more negative intrusions than imagery-based worry. In part one of the study, high-worriers were instructed to worry in either a verbal way (the Verbal group) or an imagery-based way (the Imagery group), before completing the dot probe task as a measure of attentional bias for threat-related words. In part two, the two groups worried in the same way as before and then completed the breathing focus task as a measure of the number of negative intrusions occurring after worry. The results provided support for the hypothesis that verbal worry produces more attentional bias to threat than imagery-based worry but did not support the hypothesis that imagery-based worry would produce attentional bias to stimuli specifically relating to worry content. The two groups were not found to differ in number of negative intrusions following worry. The results are interpreted in terms of verbal worry generating a "general threat detection mechanism", and a new theory of GAD is presented that incorporates this speculated mechanism. Clinical implications of the current study's findings are discussed and consideration is also given to possible future avenues for research.
Download or read book Attentional Bias to Threat in Individuals with High and Low Levels of Trait Worry written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual attention can be captured by salient or distinctive information in everyday environments and is governed by a combination of both stimulus-driven (bottom-up) and controlled (top-down) processes. Among anxious populations, attention has been widely demonstrated to be preferentially biased to threatening material compared to neutral or other valenced material. Individuals who have high levels oftrait worry, such as those with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), may be biased to threat across all aspects of their lives due to the generalised nature of worry, but the research has produced equivocal findings among worriers and GAD patients. This review aimed to systematically review the extant experimental literature to establish the current evidence of an attentional bias to threat among pathological worriers compared to healthy controls and other clinical populations. Twenty-eight published articles were included in the final review. It was found that there was strong evidence of a bias to threat among GAD patients compared to other groups and this was found across most experimental paradigms. Few studies had investigated this bias in pathological trait worriers. Among GAD patients this bias to threat was most strongly evidenced when threat material was in a verbal-linguistic format (i.e., words) rather than when in imagery form (i.e., images or faces). The bias was also found across several domains of negative material, supporting the general nature of worry. Further research should look to examine the specific components of the threat bias in GAD, as well as investigating the bias to threat in pathological trait worriers.
Download or read book Psychopathology written by W. Edward Craighead and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-06-23 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edited and written by true leaders in the field, Psychopathology provides comprehensive coverage of adult psychopathology, including an overview of the topic in the context of the DSM. Individual chapters cover the history, theory, and assessment of Axis I and Axis II adult disorders such as panic disorder, social anxiety, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder.
Download or read book Anxiety and Attention Bias Towards Threat written by Santiago Morales Pamplona and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anxiety disorders affect approximately one third of children and adults in the United States, causing a significant burden to the individual and society. Attention bias towards threat is the tendency to systematically attend to threatening cues in the environment and it may play a crucial role in the emergence and maintenance of anxiety. A growing number of studies suggest that individuals with high trait or clinical anxiety show a heightened attention bias to threat, making it an important marker of anxiety. Moreover, experimental interventions have found that manipulating the levels of attention bias consequently reduced levels of anxiety and sensitivity to stress, suggesting that such interventions could be used for preventive or therapeutic purposes. However, recent studies have reported mixed findings. This inconsistency complicates the interpretation of attention bias to threat as a marker of anxiety, as well as its potential as an effective intervention. Importantly, this variability in the findings is not considered to represent noise, but meaningful individual differences in how anxiety and attention bias manifest. The goal of the current dissertation was to better characterize these individual differences. This goal was accomplished by performing three separate studies that together addressed two outstanding issues of the current attention bias literature. The first was to study attention bias and its relation to anxiety from a developmental approach as most empirical investigations and theoretical models of attention bias lack a developmental perspective. The other major outstanding issue in the current attention bias literature is that the mechanisms behind attention bias are not well understood. The present dissertation investigated the mechanisms of attention bias by using several methods. Specifically, these studies employed multiple attention bias tasks, measured eye movement, assesed neural correlates, and evaluated the impact of a theoretically relevant congnitive process (i.e., effortful control).The results from the current dissertation suggest that: 1) it is important to consider cross-task attention bias convergence as this may index important individual characteristics such as fearful temperament and/or anxiety; 2) Attention bias can be captured during infancy and that meaningful individual differences in attention bias exist from early in development such as relations with known risk factors for anxiety; 3) other cognitive functions like effortful control likely play an important role in the relations between attention bias, fearful temperament, and anxiety. More specifically, that in early childhood, effortful control likely serves as a protective factor rather than a risk factor. Implications of these findings, limitations, as well as future directions are discussed in this dissertation.
Download or read book Attention Bias and Attentional Control in the Development of Social Anxiety Disorder written by Amanda Sue Morrison and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although several efficacious treatments exist for social anxiety disorder (SAD), less research has been devoted to identifying specific mechanisms involved in the etiology of SAD using high-risk, longitudinal designs. Given the high prevalence and personal and societal burden associated with a diagnosis of SAD, research is needed to elucidate causal factors at play in the development of SAD to inform innovative prevention programs for at-risk individuals. Theoretical models and empirical research suggest that biased attention toward threat-relevant information is an important factor in the maintenance of SAD. However, relatively little is known about the role of attention bias to threat in the development of SAD, and evidence is inconclusive with regard to whether attention biases lead to increases in anxiety over time. Also, only one study has examined attentional control as a potential factor moderating this relationship despite long-held assertions that "control over cognitive processes" may be an important individual difference factor determining the strength of the relationship between attention bias and development of excessive anxiety. Finally, a few studies have shown that attention bias to threat predicts stress reactivity, but these studies have only been conducted in unselected samples rather than with individuals at risk for developing SAD. Thus, the aims of this study were to examine the moderating effects of risk for SAD and attentional control on the relationships between attention bias to threat and (1) psychological and biological social stress reactivity and (2) development of SAD. The primary aim of the study was to examine the aforementioned relationships using attention bias to threat as assessed using the modified probe detection task (MPDT). In an exploratory analysis, the relationships were examined using an index of attention disengagement bias assessed with the Posner spatial cueing task (PSCT). Attentional control was represented by four indices, analyzed in separate regression analyses given their weak bivariate associations (i.e., Antisaccade task reaction time and accuracy rate, Attention Network Test executive control score, and total score on the Attentional Control Scale). First-year college students at low or high risk for developing SAD completed assessments of attention bias, attentional control, and anxiety during their first month of college. Approximately four months later, they completed a social stressor task and the same self-report measures of social anxiety. At the end of their first year in college, they completed the self-report measures of social anxiety once more, as well as a diagnostic interview for SAD. Correlational analyses indicated that attention bias to threat on the MPDT was associated with concurrent self-reported social anxiety but did not prospectively predict psychological or biological social stress reactivity, self-reported social anxiety, or SAD diagnostic status at the end of the first year in college. Hierarchical regression analyses supported the hypothesized double moderation for concurrent social anxiety, such that high levels of attentional control weakened the association between attention bias toward threat and social anxiety, only among the individuals at high risk for SAD. However, analyses did not support this relationship in predicting prospective outcomes, and several unexpected patterns emerged in which interactions between attention bias and attentional control were observed to predict prospective outcomes, but only among individuals at low risk for developing SAD. Likewise, exploratory analyses using the PSCT index of attention bias revealed unexpected interactions between risk group, attention bias, and attentional control. Considered together, results of the current study highlight the importance of considering individual differences in attention bias and attentional control in the maintenance and development of SAD.
Download or read book Understanding Anxiety Through the Constructs of Attentional Bias and Attentional Scope written by Mengran Xu and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anxiety disorders are common and debilitating, and there are substantial research efforts to better understand and treat them. These efforts are characterized by two leading trends: an emphasis on the role of attentional biases in their development and persistence, and an emphasis on mindfulness as a means of ameliorating them. However, there are substantial problems with both lines of research. Fist, research on attentional biases to threat (ABT) has yielded highly inconsistent findings with respect to the nature of the biases and when they occur. Most studies to date have failed to account for factors that influence attentional deployment, such as motivation to approach vs. avoid threat, and almost no studies have examined attentional biases that occur when people are occupied with an attentionally demanding task, which far more resembles what happens in real life when faced with a threat. There is emerging evidence showing that visual attention to threat varies substantially according to motivation, and that clinically significant anxiety may be characterized more by ambivalence about where to deploy attention in face of threat. Second, mindfulness is now widely recommended as a treatment for anxiety disorders despite the absence of a viable theory as to the mechanism of action by which it is effective. This is especially concerning given the current hype about its effects. Research has clearly demonstrated that anxiety is associated with a narrow scope of attention (the one frowning face in an audience) as opposed to a broad scope of attention (the entire crowd). New theories proposed that a function of mindfulness is to broaden perspective, which may explain how mindfulness ameliorates anxiety. This program of research aimed to address these issues in three studies. The first study was designed to assess the impact of motivation to attend to vs. avoid attending to an external threat (a live tarantula) in people who were high in spider fear, while they completed a competing attentionally demanding task. The second study was designed to better understand ambivalent motivation by selecting a sample and stimuli that may yield a high degree of approach-avoidance conflict; in this study, individuals who self-identified as restrained eaters underwent a passive viewing task in which they were exposed to high calorie food vs. neutral images while their eye movements were tracked. The third study examined the extent to which a brief mindfulness intervention influenced the scope of perceptual attention, conceptual attention, and thought-action repertoires. Results from Studies 1 and 2 revealed a significant impact of motivation on attentional deployment, such that different motivational groups demonstrated different patterns of attentional biases to threat. This calls into question the conceptualization of ATB as a homogenous construct, as it would seem anxious individuals may engage in different types of attentional deployment when confronting threat. Results also revealed that individuals who showed high motivation to both look at and to avoid looking at the tarantula (that is, participants who were ambivalent) did not show a decrease in fear of the spider whereas all other participants did. In Study 2, individuals who reported high motivation to both look at and to avoid looking at high calorie food endorsed more restrained eating behaviours and stronger pathological beliefs, such that even looking at food could make one gain weight. Thus, ambivalent motivation may be a characteristic of greater psychopathology. In Study 3, it was found that for participants whose baseline attentional scope was narrow, mindfulness was associated with the broadening of attentional scope and an improvement in mood state. Theoretical and clinical implications for understanding and treating anxiety were discussed.
Download or read book An Emotional Regulation Based Psychotherapeutic Approach To Generalized Anxiety Disorder written by Khanna Isha and published by Techroot. This book was released on 2022-08-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) Generalized Anxiety disorder is a chronic, complex and crippling anxiety disorder that has uncontrollable and excessive worrying as its hallmark characteristic. The prevalence of Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is very high in the general population. Also, this disorder is known to be the second most frequently occurring mental health disorder in primary care hospitals (Barrett et al., 1988, Wittchen et al., 2002). In GAD, worrying is experienced as uncontrollable and is pervasive in nature (Davey, Eldridge et al., 2007; Paulesu et al., 2010). In those afflicted with GAD, this form of excessive worrying is often accompanied by physical symptoms such as trembling, muscle tension, headaches, irritability, palpitations etc. GAD sufferers are reported to spend most of their waking hours worrying about multiple big and small things. Another important feature of worrying in GAD, is that it is disproportionate to the magnitude of the actual threat posed by a situation. GAD sufferers live in the anticipation of some catastrophe looming in their lives and are just unable to relax themselves and live in a perpetual state of anxiety. GAD sufferers evince a threatening attentional and interpretive bias. They are inclined to pay attention to threatening information and tend to interpret emotionally ambiguous information as threatening (Beck and Clark, 1997; MacLeod and Rutherford, 2004; Hayes and Hirsch, 2007). GAD had bewildered both researchers and clinicians in the past. It was considered as a mild disorder of the "worried well" (Newman et al., 2013), but with the passage of time and in the light of ever advancing scientific enquiry, GAD has proven to be a complex disorder which is elusive in nature. Worrying in GAD lacks a clear and specific focal point or narrow range of feared stimuli, whereas in the case of other anxiety disorders like phobia, fear is regarding a particular or clearly identifiable thing or situation, or like the case of OCD, where there is specific fear, like fear of contamination. The anxiety which is characteristic of generalized anxiety disorder, is by nature, diffuse and is characterized by a generalized feeling of apprehensiveness,
Download or read book Anxiety and Cognition written by Michael Eysenck and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is argued in this book that there are three major approaches to anxiety. First, there is anxiety as an emotional state. Second, there is trait anxiety as a dimension of personality. Third, there is anxiety as a set of anxiety disorders. What is attempted is to produce a unified theory of anxiety which integrates all these major approaches. According to this unified theory, there are four sources of information which influence the level of experienced anxiety: (1) experimental stimulation; (2) internal physiological activity; (3) internal cognitions, (e.g., worries); and (4) one's own behaviour. The unified theory is essentially based on a cognitive approach. More specifically, it is assumed that individual differences in experienced anxiety between those high and low in trait anxiety depend largely on cognitive biases. It is also assumed that the various anxiety disorders depend on cognitive biases, and that the main anxiety disorders differ in terms of the source of information most affected by such biases (e.g., social phobics have biased interpretation of their own behaviour). In sum, this book presents a general theory of anxiety from the cognitive perspective. It is intended that this theory will influence theory and research on emotion, personality, and the anxiety disorders. Correction notice: Christos Halkiopoulos should have been credited for his role as the inventor of the Dot Probe Paradigm and for the design and execution of the experiment discussed in C. D. Spielberger, I. G. Sarason, Z. Kulczar, and J. Van Heck (Eds.), Stress and Emotion, Vol. 14. London: Hemisphere.
Download or read book From Symptom to Synapse written by Jan Mohlman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited volume bridges the gap between basic and applied science in understanding the nature and treatment of psychiatric disorders and mental health problems. Topics such as brain imaging, physiological indices of emotion, cognitive enhancement strategies, neuropsychological and cognitive training, and related techniques as tools for increasing our understanding of anxiety, depression, addictions, schizophrenia, ADHD, and other disorders are emphasized. Mental health professionals will learn how to integrate a neurocognitive perspective into their clinical research and practice of psychotherapy.
Download or read book Contemporary Cognitive Therapy written by Robert L. Leahy and published by Guilford Publications. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together a stellar array of contributors whose work has been directly influenced by Aaron T. Beck, this volume presents current advances in cognitive therapy science and practice. Described are new and effective ways of understanding and treating clients suffering from a wide range of affective, anxiety, and personality disorders. The status of basic cognitive therapy principles and models is discussed, and important theoretical and clinical refinements are elaborated. Other topics include innovative applications for children and adolescents, couples, and families, as well as progress that has been made in integrating cognitive therapy with other treatments, such as pharmacotherapy.
Download or read book An Update on Anxiety Disorders written by Marwa Azab and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-14 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to synthesize recent theoretical and experimental findings from psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics and genetics to understand anxiety disorders and their etiology and treatments. Each anxiety disorder is discussed from cognitive, behavioral and biological perspectives. The book evaluates talk therapies, mindfulness-based interventions, brain stimulation, biofeedback and neurofeedback treatments. Chapters consider a biologically-informed framework for the understanding of anxiety disorders. In line with current thinking, the book integrates many levels of information (from genomics and circuits to behavior and self-report) to understand normal and abnormal human behaviors. Synthesizing recent research on anxiety disorders according to their categorization in the DSM5, this book will bring psychology students, researchers, psychiatrists and psychologists up to date.
Download or read book Treating and Preventing Adolescent Mental Health Disorders written by Dwight L. Evans and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 921 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reviews the latest information about the treatment and prevention of major mental disorders that emerge during adolescence. It should be a primary resource for both clinicians and researchers, with special attention to gaps in our knowledge.
Download or read book The Mental Impact of Sports Injury written by Carly D. McKay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much is known about the physical strain that athletes’ bodies are subjected to and the dangerous aspects of competition immediately spring to mind. But why do athletes train the way they do, and why do they push the limits? Why do some recover well from injury while others struggle? Despite decades of medical and sport science research, a piece has been missing from this picture. Until recently, the role of psychological factors in risk and rehabilitation has been poorly understood. Thankfully, there is increasing awareness of just how crucial these factors can be for predicting injury, improving recovery, developing prevention strategies, and supporting athletes’ long-term health. Yet, research in this area is still in its infancy and it can be difficult to synthesize an ever-growing body of knowledge into practical injury management approaches. Using analogies from everyday life, The Mental Impact of Sports Injury bridges the gap between academic research and practical settings in an informative, yet easy to follow guide to the psychology of sports injury. Addressing risk, rehabilitation, and prevention, it outlines key considerations for researchers and practitioners across all levels of sport. Alongside the fundamentals of injury psychology, emerging areas of importance are also discussed, including training load monitoring and the technological advances that are shaping modern sport medicine. Targeted examples highlight the challenges of preventing and managing injury in grassroots, elite, and professional contexts, with chapters dedicated to the under-served communities of youth and Para sport athletes. Stepping away from traditional texts, this unique book presents the landmark literature, major concepts, and athlete insights into sports injury psychology from a totally new perspective.
Download or read book The Cambridge Handbook of Anxiety and Related Disorders written by Bunmi O. Olatunji and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 1339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook surveys existing descriptive and experimental approaches to the study of anxiety and related disorders, emphasizing the provision of empirically-guided suggestions for treatment. Based upon the findings from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the chapters collected here highlight contemporary approaches to the classification, presentation, etiology, assessment, and treatment of anxiety and related disorders. The collection also considers a biologically-informed framework for the understanding of mental disorders proposed by the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC). The RDoC has begun to create a new kind of taxonomy for mental disorders by bringing the power of modern research approaches in genetics, neuroscience, and behavioral science to the problem of mental illness. The framework is a key focus for this book as an authoritative reference for researchers and clinicians.
