Individuals who perform poorly on measures of the executive function of inhibition have higher anxious arousal in comparison to those with better performance. High anxious arousal is associated with a pro-inflammatory response. Chronically high anxious arousal and inflammation increase one's risk of developing type 2 diabetes. We sought to evaluate anxious arousal and inflammation as underlying...

Previous studies using adult observers are inconsistent with regard to social skills deficits in nonclinical socially anxious youth. The present study investigated whether same age peers perceive a lack of social skills in the socially anxious. Twenty high and 20 low socially anxious adolescents (13-17 years old) were recorded giving a 5-min speech. Unfamiliar peer observers (12-17 years old) v...

BACKGROUND Earlier studies have shown that employment and burnout are related to anxiety and depression. This twin-family study investigates to what extent these associations are caused by shared etiological factors. METHODS In a sample of 4,309 Dutch twins and 1,008 siblings, bivariate genetic analyses of employment and anxious depression and of burnout and anxious depression were carried ou...

BACKGROUND Behavioral studies show that attention training can alter threat bias, influence vulnerability to stress and reduce clinical anxiety symptoms. The aim of this study was to examine which cognitive functions of attention processing are modulated by attention training, and how a priori anxiety interacts with the attention training procedure. Specifically, we expected modulation in the P...

The relation between social anxiety and hedonic activity remains poorly understood. From a self-regulatory perspective, we hypothesized that socially anxious individuals experience diminished positive experiences and events on days when they are unable to manage socially anxious feelings adequately. In this 21-day experience-sampling study, we constructed daily measures of social anxiety and em...

The current experiment employed a thought suppression paradigm to investigate whether repressors (N=40) are more skilled in suppressing positive and anxious autobiographical thoughts than low anxious (N=40), high anxious (N=40), and defensive high anxious (N=40) individuals, both immediately and over a longer time period (i.e., 7 days). Regardless of suppression instructions, repressors reporte...

The present study investigated whether post-event processing (PEP) involving mental imagery about a past speech is particularly detrimental for socially anxious individuals who are currently anticipating giving a speech. One hundred fourteen high and low socially anxious participants were told they would give a 5 min impromptu speech at the end of the experimental session. They were randomly as...

This study investigated the potential causes of anxious people's social avoidance. The classic ultimatum game was utilized in concert with electroencephalogram recording. Participants were divided into two groups according to levels of trait anxiety as identified by a self-report scale. The behavioral results indicate that high-anxious participants were more prone to reject human-proposed than ...

The present study tested the hypothesis that anxious apprehension involves more left- than right-hemisphere activity and that anxious arousal is associated with the opposite pattern. Behavioral and fMRI responses to threat stimuli in an emotional Stroop task were examined in nonpatient groups reporting anxious apprehension, anxious arousal, or neither. Reaction times were longer for negative th...

This study examined the interrelationships among anxiety, personality disorders, and coping strategies in anxious older adults (n = 28; age range = 55-89; mean = 66.0), nonanxious older adults (n = 100, age range = 55-79, mean = 64.6 ), and anxious younger adults (n = 132; age range = 17-30; mean = 20.2). Younger participants were college students and older participants were community-based fam...