In order to examine the relationship between anxiety and reinforcing effects of alcohol, drug-naive male Wistar rats weighing 250-300 g were classified as "anxious" and "non-anxious" in the elevated plusmaze test. A conditioned place preference test was then used to investigate the reinforcing effects of ethanol (EtOH) on these animals. On 2 alternate days, groups of "anxious", "non-anxious" an...

It was hypothesized that combined individual child vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal stress (peer exclusion) would predict the strongest responses to experimentally manipulated behavioral peer rejection. Results indicated that in a sample of 3rd graders (N = 160, 59% girls), anxious solitary excluded children displayed more behavioral manifestations of social helplessness befor...

Death anxiety is a basic fear underlying a range of psychological conditions, and has been found to increase avoidance in social anxiety. Given that attentional bias is a core feature of social anxiety, the aim of the present study was to examine the impact of mortality salience (MS) on attentional bias in social anxiety. Participants were 36 socially anxious and 37 non-socially anxious individ...

Research suggests that anxiety disorders tend to temporally precede depressive disorders, a finding potentially relevant to understanding comorbidity. The current study used diary methods to determine whether daily anxious mood also temporally precedes daily depressed mood. 55 participants with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and history of depressive symptoms completed a 21-day daily diary ...

Summar)-Behavioral inhibition system (BIS) functioning (Gray, The Psychology of Fear and Stress. Cambridge University Press, 1987) was assessed by measuring whether approach responses were emitted more slowly when a cue for punishment was present. Experiment 1 compared highand low-anxious as well as highand low-impulsive university students. As predicted by Gray’s model (Gray, The neuropsycholo...

This study examined the effect of situation salience on interpretation and avoidant response biases in clinically anxious and non-clinical children. The relationship between mothers' threat perception and expectations of their children's coping, and children's threat perception and coping expectations was also assessed. Forty clinically anxious and 40 non-clinical children (ages 7-14) participa...

According to attentional control theory, high trait anxious individuals experience reduced attentional control as compared to low trait anxious individuals due to the imbalance between goal-directed and stimulus-driven attentional systems. One consequence is that high trait anxious individuals have difficulty resisting distraction, as compared to low trait anxious individuals. A separate line o...

Anxious children show attention biases towards and away from threat stimuli. Moreover, threat avoidance compared to vigilance predicts a poorer outcome from exposure-based treatments, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), yet the mechanisms underlying this differential response are unclear. Pavlovian fear conditioning is a widely accepted theory to explain the acquisition and extinction ...