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Updated: Oct 20, 2025

Reducing State Anxiety Using Working Memory Maintenance
Published on: July 19, 2017
Anxiety sensitivity, distress intolerance, and negative interpretation bias strengthen the relationship between trait
Noah J French1,2, Jeremy W Eberle1, Bethany A Teachman1
1Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA.
Background Objectives:
Depersonalization is common in anxiety disorders, but little is known about factors that influence co-occurring anxiety and depersonalization.
Design:
We investigated trait moderators of the relationships between state and trait anxiety and depersonalization to better understand their co-occurrence and to identify potential points of intervention.
Methods:
Adults recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 303) completed two computer tasks designed to increase variability in state anxiety and depersonalization as well as several self-report questionnaires.
Results:
As hypothesized, anxiety positively predicted depersonalization at both a state level and trait level. Moreover, as hypothesized, the trait anxiety-trait depersonalization relationship was strengthened by greater anxiety sensitivity; distress intolerance; and negative interpretation bias for anxiety sensations, and for depersonalization sensations. None of these hypothesized trait moderators significantly strengthened the state anxiety-state depersonalization relationship.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that, on a trait level, anxiety and depersonalization more frequently co-occur when people catastrophically misinterpret their symptoms or have lower emotional distress tolerance.
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