Information Processing Biases And Emotional Attitude In GAD Individuals
Probability overestimation, catastrophizing and information-processing biases
A well defined aspect of the GAD affected individual is his/her tendence to amplify the probability that an unwanted event takes place. Moreover, GAD individuals tend to consider the ultimate outcome of a sequence of events triggered by the worried phenomenon as highly probable even though the chances for negative outcome are perceived as being much lower from other normal individuals7.
Attentional biases have been related to GAD for a long time. It has been proposed that individuals in the GAD condition pay more attention to scaring events and signals and remember them more easily as consequence of memory biases. Such an attitude is thought to result in the increased doses of anxiety and worry that characterizes GAD individuals. A 2005 study using modified Stroop and Visual Probe tasks has concluded that GAD individuals are biased with respect to external cues8.
Another information-processing bias seen in individuals in the GAD condition is interpreting ambiguous stimuli in a negative manner. There are studies9,10 showing how biases in spelling homophones(dye is spelled as die) accompany low social desirability and anxiety. Some studies suggest that negative interpretation of ambiguous stimuli appears to be associated with intolerance of uncertainity17.
Biases in memory for threatening cues has also been studied in GAD. Initially it was hypothesized that individuals with GAD will be inclined to remember threatening stimuli rather than neutral ones as well as demomstrate a more enhanced memory of threatening stimuli than control participants. There is no robust evidence to support the explicit memory bias11,12, nevertheless, implicit memory biases have been partially identified in GAD individuals13.
There is evidence that worry in GAD is primarily a verbal-linguistic process which means that people with GAD tend to think more in terms of words than images. There is a robust body of research which shows that GADs are verbal thinkers14,15.
Finally, it must be said that thought suppression is thought to be impossible in GAD individuals. This has been partially shown by a study16 where the effects of image-based and verbal thought-based worry were analyzed and the latter proved to be impossible to suppress. Borkovec`s avoidance theory.
Emotional attitude
Some studies suggest that individuals with GAD have difficulty in regulating their emotions. Emotional dysregulation manifests itself as I)inability to modulate high-intensity emotional experiences and as II)excessive recourse to control strategies to suppress the perception of emotion. In plane language, GAD individuals, emotionally speaking, tend to demonstrate either extreme emotions or emotional insensivity. Being characterized by an emotional condition which oscillates between extremes, such individuals tend to be perceived as lunatic18.
7) Catastrophizing Assessment of worry and threat schemata among worriers, Dugas et al, 2000.
8) Attentional Bias in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Versus Depressive disorder, K. Mogg et al, 2005.
9) Anxiety and the spelling and use in sentences of threat/neutral homophones, A.Richards, Alison Reynolds and Christopher C. French, 1993.
10) Interpretation of homophones related to threat: Anxiety or response bias effects?, K.Mogg et al, 1994.
11)Explicit memory in anxiety disorders, Becker et al, 1999.
12)Implicit and explicit memory bias in anxiety, Mathews A., Mogg K., May J.; Eysenck M., 1989.
13) Implicit and explicit memory bias in anxiety: A conceptual replication, MacLeod C. and McLaughlin K., 1995.
14)Thought and imaginal activity during worry and trauma recall, Behar E., Zuellig A.R., Boorkovec T.D., 2005.
15)Thoughts, images, worry and anxiety, Freeston M.H, Dugas M.J., Ladouceur R., 1996.
16)The effects of suppressing thoughts and images about worrisome stimuli, Behar E., Vescio T.K., Borkovec T.D., 2005.
17) Intolerance of Uncertainty and Information Processing: Evidence of Biased Recall and Interpretations, Dugas et al, 2005.
18)Preliminary evidence for an emotion dysregulation model of generalized anxiety disorder(GAD), Mennin D. S., Heimberg R.G., Turk C. L., Fresco D. M., 2004.
19)Comparison between rumination and worry in a non-clinical population,Watkins E., Moulds M., Mackintosh B., 2005.
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