The present study examined cognitive content-specificity in future-event predictions associated with symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). College undergraduates (N=284) completed measures of depression, GAD, and rated their certainty that a given set of positive and negative outcomes were or were not likely to happen in their future. Participants also completed measure...

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a highly prevalent, chronic, debilitating, relapsing, and often underdiagnosed anxiety disorder. Characterized by a waxing and waning episodic clinical course replete with periods of remission and relapse, GAD presents with excessive and pathological worry that is difficult to control. A diagnosis of GAD incorporates physical, psychological, and cognitive s...

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is identified as a discrete disorder in the DSM-5, but evidence suggests that GAD and the related construct of pathological worry possesses a dimensional latent structure. The objective of this study was to ascertain the latent structure of GAD using taxometric methods. A subsample of adults (N=2061) from the Midlife in the United States Study, a national samp...

BACKGROUND Although an attentional bias for threat has been implicated in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), evidence supporting such a bias has been inconsistent. This study examines whether exposure to different emotional content modulates attention disengagement and impairs the perception of subsequently presented nonemotional targets in GAD. METHODS Patients with GAD (n = 30) and control...

BACKGROUND Postnatally depressed mothers have difficulties responding appropriately to their infants. The quality of the mother-child relationship depends on a mother's ability to respond to her infant's cues, which are largely non-verbal. Therefore, it is likely that difficulties in a mother's appraisal of her infants' facial expressions will affect the quality of mother-infant interaction. Th...

Applied Relaxation (AR), which involves noticing early signs of anxiety and responding with a relaxation response, is an empirically supported treatment for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). However, research on hypothesized mechanisms of AR (e.g., reduced muscle tension) has been mixed, making it likely that additional mechanisms are contributing to the efficacy of AR. Stemming from more rec...

Preliminary evidence supports the role of emotion-related deficits in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), including heightened emotional intensity, poor understanding of emotion, negative cognitive reactivity to emotions, and maladaptive emotion management. However, questions remain concerning the specificity of these emotion-related deficits compared to highly comorbid conditions such as socia...

Worry, the anticipation of future threat, is a common feature of anxiety and mood psychopathology. Considerable research has examined the latent structure of worry to determine whether this construct reflects a dimensional or taxonic structure. Recent taxometric investigations have provided support for a unidimensional structure of worry; however, the results of these studies are limited in tha...

Two classification systems are now at the forefront of clinical psychiatric research: (1) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition and (2) the National Institutes of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria. Herein, we propose that these two classification systems are complementary rather than mutually exclusive, and when combined provide important information for understanding aspects of...

Interpretations of negative, positive, and ambiguous situations were examined in individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), other anxiety disorders (ANX), and no psychiatric condition (CTRL). Additionally, relationships between specific beliefs about uncertainty (Uncertainty Has Negative Behavioral and Self-Referent Implications [IUS-NI], and Uncertainty Is Unfair and Spoils Everythin...