Examined the associations of adolescents' self-reported anxiety sensitivity with semi-structured, interview-based anxiety and depressive symptoms and anxiety disorders. The sample included 121 adolescents and their parents who participated in a larger epidemiological, high-risk family study of substance abuse and anxiety disorders (Merikangas, Dierker, & Szatmari, 1998). A series of hierarchica...

Objective: Generalized anxiety disorder is one of the most common anxiety disorders in the general ‎population. Several studies suggest that anxiety sensitivity is a vulnerability factor in generalized ‎anxiety severity. However, some other studies suggest that negative repetitive thinking and ‎experiential avoidance as response factors can explain this relationship. Therefore, this study ‎aime...

Trait anxiety began as a psychodynamic concept, poorly tied to observables, and requiring Freudian defense mechanisms to explain recurrent anxiety episodes. Spielberger's thoughtful efforts improved the concept, but some important limitations remained. Lilienfeld, Turner, and Jacob (1989, 1993, 1996) uncritically accepted Spielberger's work on trait anxiety and asserted that it is the standard ...

BACKGROUND Repeated administration of anxiety sensitivity measures can often produce declining scores, even in ostensible control groups, which is a significant concern for researchers. The reasons for these changes are as yet unknown, but could be because of regression to the mean in samples selected on extreme scores, exposure to general information about anxiety contained in psychiatric inte...

Past research has demonstrated a strong relationship between threat sensitivity and social anxiety; however, the relationship between reward sensitivity and social anxiety is less clear. Further, the role that emotion regulation (ER) may play in the expression of social anxiety disorder (SAD) is rarely considered. The current study tested whether two emotion regulation strategies (emotional sup...

OBJECTIVE To examine relationships among trait anxiety sensitivity, state task-specific anticipatory anxiety, and laboratory pain responses in healthy children and adolescents. METHODS Participants (N=118, 49.2% female, ages 8-18 years) completed a measure of anxiety sensitivity and rated anticipatory anxiety prior to undergoing thermal, pressure, and cold pain tasks. Linear and logistic regr...