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| The Cognitive Vulnerability to Anxiety Laboratory is dedicated to
understanding the origins and nature of anxiety, depression, and related
psychopathology in terms of their cognitive and information-processing
causes and correlates. The importance of cognitive styles as psychological
antecedents of psychopathology has gained increasing acceptance over the
past two decades. While ample research has explored the cognitive styles
that confer vulnerability to depression, the cognitive styles that confer
vulnerability to anxiety have received considerably less attention. Over
the past nine years, Riskind and colleagues have proposed and examined
the “looming maladaptive style” as a stable individual difference and cognitive
style that functions as a danger schema to produce specific vulnerability
to anxiety, but not depression. According to the looming vulnerability
model (Riskind, 1997; Riskind & Williams, 1999; Riskind & Williams,
2000; Riskind, Williams, Gessner, Chrosniak, & Cortina, 2000) anxiety
is evoked by perceptions of dynamically rising risk or escalating urgency–
which we label “looming vulnerability.” This sense of looming vulnerability
leads to an assessment of rapidly escalating risk and engenders a sense
of overwhelming urgency in the individual to cope with or neutralize potential
threats as rapidly as possible. This process enhances worry and avoidance
coping. When circumstances offer no way to successfully engage in behavioral
avoidance, the overwhelming motivation to neutralize threat often results
in cognitive avoidance, such as thought suppression, worry and thought
stopping. Some individuals develop a relatively stable cognitive vulnerability
to anxiety that functions as a danger schema, which we refer to as the
looming maladaptive style (LMS). |
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| Numerous studies conducted by the CVA Lab have examined the validity
of the looming maladaptive style and, more generally, the looming vulnerability
model of anxiety (e.g., Riskind, 1997; Riskind et al., 1997; Riskind et
al., 1999; Riskind & Maddux, 1993; Riskind, Moore, & Bowley, 1995;
Riskind & Wahl, 1992, Riskind & Williams, 1999a & b; Williams
& Riskind, 1999; Williams, Riskind, & Long, 1999). These studies
have employed a variety of methodologies to investigate the validity of
the looming vulnerability model, including self-report assessments, computer-simulated
movement of objects (e.g., moving spiders vs. moving rabbits), the presentation
of video-taped scenarios (e.g., a campus mugging, possible contamination
scenarios, etc.), and the presentation of moving and static visual images.
Further, these studies have investigated a range of cognitive-clinical
phenomena (e.g., anxiety, thought suppression, coping styles, uncontrollability,
catastrophizing, worry, attachment styles, etc) across a wide range of
stimuli (e.g., individuals with mental illness, individuals with HIV, contamination,
spiders, weight gain, social and romantic rejection, performance mistakes,
etc.) and a diversity of populations (e.g., individuals with subclinical
obsessive-compulsive disorder, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder,
post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, depression, specific phobias,
and subclinical eating disorders). These studies have provided consistent
evidence that the LMS represents a cognitive risk factor for anxiety that
operates by systematically biasing all levels of information processing
(attention, memory, elaboration, and interpretation). |
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| The CVA lab is directed by John
H. Riskind, Ph.D, Professor of Psychology at George Mason University,
and a number of advanced doctoral students in the Clinical Psychology Doctoral
Program. Several other faculty at GMU participate actively in the
lab, including
Ted
Gessner and Linda
Chrosniak. Further, the CVA lab is dedicated to training undergraduate
students in the process of conducting psychological research and continually
has a large number of undergraduate research assistants (for more information
click on the "Join Our Lab" link). While the major thrusts of the CVA lab's
research are on the looming vulnerability model of anxiety -and the cognitive
differentiation of anxiety from depression, we also actively conduct research
on various issues that pertain to emotional disorders. Recent projects
include research on: thought suppression strategies as they apply to impulse
control disorders; coping flexibility and coping styles as additional risk
factors for emotional disorders (N. Williams); the relationship between
emotional disorders and attachment styles; social phobia in a classroom
context; metacognition and metaworry; how vulnerability to emotional disorders
affects romantic relationships; the adaptive significance of intrusive
thinking; and, narrative paradigms for studying anxious cognition. |
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