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Automaticity and the anxiety disorders

¹Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Behaviour Research and Therapy

|September 1, 1995

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Information-processing biases in anxiety disorders are often involuntary and unconscious, but not capacity-free. This challenges traditional views of automaticity in cognitive psychology and has implications for behavior therapy.

Area of Science:

Cognitive psychology
Psychopathology
Anxiety disorders

Background:

Experimental psychopathologists increasingly use cognitive psychology to study information-processing biases in anxiety.
Many anxiety-related biases are presumed to be automatic, not strategic.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the automaticity of threat processing in anxiety disorders.
To examine whether traditional attributes of automaticity apply to anxiety-related biases.

Main Methods:

Review of experimental and clinical findings on selective threat processing in anxiety.
Analysis of attributes of automaticity (capacity-free, unconscious, involuntary) in the context of anxiety.

Main Results:

Related Experiment Videos

Findings suggest that anxiety-related biases are automatic in being involuntary and sometimes unconscious.

These biases are not automatic in the sense of being capacity-free.

Conclusions:

Automatic processing of threat in anxiety disorders is involuntary but requires cognitive capacity.
Implications for behavior therapy interventions targeting these involuntary biases are discussed.