Predicting anxiety: The role of experiential avoidance and anxiety sensitivity
Section snippets
Participants
Participants included 42 adults (22 women, 20 men) with a mean age of 27.21 years (SD = 13.06; range = 18–63 years). Of the sample, 91% identified as Caucasian. All 42 participants received the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule (ADIS; Di Nardo, Brown, & Barlow, 1994) at one of the following sites: the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC) and the OCD and Related Disorders Program at Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospitals (Hoffman Estates,
Data analytic strategy
As our aim was to examine the relationship between the predictor variables (EA and AS) and the symptoms of general anxiety (as opposed to disorder-specific signs and symptoms; e.g., obsessions, compulsions, avoidance, panic attacks), we combined patients with different anxiety diagnoses into a single group for our analyses. To test our hypotheses, we first computed correlation coefficients to examine zero-order relationships among EA (AAQ-II), AS and its three dimensions (ASI-3 and its
Sample characteristics
Table 1 presents the group means and standard deviations on the study measures. As would be expected in a group of individuals diagnosed with anxiety disorders, mean scores were indicative of significant levels of anxious psychopathology.
Zero-order correlations
To examine the relationships among study variables, we computed zero-order correlations. These results are presented in Table 2. The AAQ-II is unique among the study measures in that higher scores indicate less psychopathology. Therefore, its correlations with
Discussion
The aims of this study were to investigate relationships between AS and EA, and to examine the independent and relative contributions of these variables in explaining anxiety symptoms. AS is a well-established psychological risk factor for anxiety psychopathology (e.g., Schmidt et al., 1997, Schmidt et al., 2007, Zvolensky et al., 2006). EA has also received empirical support as a factor in theoretical models of anxiety (e.g., Eifert and Heffner, 2003, Hayes et al., 1996, Levitt et al., 2004).
References (32)
- et al.
The role of cognitive factors in the pathogenesis of obsessive–compulsive symptoms: A prospective study
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(2006) A cognitive approach to panic
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(1986)Anxiety disorders: Why they persist and how to treat them
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(1999)- et al.
Does the Beck anxiety inventory measure anything beyond panic attack symptoms?
Behavior Research and Therapy
(1996) - et al.
The effects of acceptance versus control contexts on avoidance of panic-related symptoms
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry
(2003) - et al.
Acceptance and commitment therapy: Model, processes, and outcomes
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(2006) - et al.
Acceptance and mindfulness-based therapy: New wave or old hat?
Clinical Psychology Review
(2008) - et al.
The effects of acceptance versus suppression of emotion on subjective and psychophysiological response to carbon dioxide challenge in patients with panic disorder
Behavior Therapy
(2004) - et al.
Anxiety sensitivity, anxiety frequency, and the prediction of fearfulness
Behaviour Research and Therapy
(1986) - et al.
Generalized anxiety and panic disorders: Response to Cox, Cohen, Direnfeld, and Swinson
Behavior Research and Therapy
(1996)
Risk factor research and prevention programs for anxiety disorders: A translational research framework
Behaviour Research and Therapy
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders
Anxiety and its disorders
An inventory for measuring clinical anxiety: Psychometric properties
Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology
Beck depression inventory manual
Cited by (89)
Identifying self-disclosed anxiety on Twitter: A natural language processing approach
2023, Psychiatry ResearchTargeting Anxiety Sensitivity With Evidence-Based Psychoeducation: A Randomized Waitlist-Controlled Trial of a Brief Standalone Digital Intervention
2023, Cognitive and Behavioral PracticeManaging emotions in panic disorder: A systematic review of studies related to emotional intelligence, alexithymia, emotion regulation, and coping
2023, Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental PsychiatryManaging fear and anxiety in development: A framework for understanding the neurodevelopment of emotion regulation capacity and tendency
2023, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsCognitive risk factors and the experience of acute anxiety following social stressors: An ecological momentary assessment study
2022, Journal of Anxiety DisordersCitation Excerpt :Then, models were estimated to examine the effects of the constructs after controlling for their shared variance. As ASSC and FNE relate to trait anxious arousal and anxious apprehension (Berman et al., 2010; Collins et al., 2005; Weeks et al., 2005; Wheaton et al., 2012) and predict fluctuations in anxious arousal and anxious apprehension (Allan et al., 2019; Carter et al., 2012; Daniel et al., 2020; Koval & Kuppens, 2012), it was expected that both ASSC and FNE would be positively related to overall anxious arousal and anxious apprehension and within-person fluctuations (i.e., individual participant variance) in these constructs. Given ASSC is conceptualized as an amplifier of anxious arousal and FNE is conceptualized as an amplifier of anxious apprehension, it was hypothesized that ASSC would independently predict anxious arousal following social stressors and FNE would independently predict anxious apprehension following social stressors.
Incremental validity of the AAQ-II for anxiety disorder symptomology
2021, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science