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- Title
- Malleability beliefs of anxiety : impact on treatment preferences and emotion regulation
- Creator
- Schroder, Hans (Hans S.)
- Date
- 2018
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
Beliefs about how much people can change their attributes influence cognitive, affective, and motivational responses to challenging situations. Most research on this topic has focused on academic contexts, but newer work suggests these types of beliefs may relate to clinical phenomena as well. Specifically, recent studies show that the belief that anxiety is changeable (the growth mindset of anxiety) relates to a preference for individual therapy versus medication and greater engagement in...
Show moreBeliefs about how much people can change their attributes influence cognitive, affective, and motivational responses to challenging situations. Most research on this topic has focused on academic contexts, but newer work suggests these types of beliefs may relate to clinical phenomena as well. Specifically, recent studies show that the belief that anxiety is changeable (the growth mindset of anxiety) relates to a preference for individual therapy versus medication and greater engagement in psychosocial treatments for anxiety disorders. A working model proposes that the growth mindset of anxiety promotes a motivation to engage in effortful strategies to experience and learn from uncomfortable emotions. However, all research to date on this construct has been correlational in nature. Therefore, the present investigation sought to examine the impact of a brief experimental manipulation promoting the growth mindset of anxiety. Study 1 was an online study and examined the causal impact of this belief on treatment preferences (therapy vs. medication), willingness to initiate in future treatment, and anticipated efficacy of such treatments. The intervention successfully increased growth mindset of anxiety endorsement, increased participants’ willingness to initiate future treatment, and increased expected efficacy at a trend level. It did not have an effect on treatment preference. Study 2 examined the impact of the mindset manipulation on electrophysiological correlates of emotion regulation. Baseline differences (before the intervention) between groups made comparisons difficult, but there was some evidence that those in the mindset condition were less reactive to negative stimuli overall after the intervention. Overall, the two studies suggest that the anxiety mindset can be induced and may have implications for treatment motivation and emotion regulation processes that deserve further study.
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- Title
- The effects of expressive writing on neural markers of cognitive processing in worriers
- Creator
- Schroder, Hans (Hans S.)
- Date
- 2014
- Collection
- Electronic Theses & Dissertations
- Description
-
Individuals with excessive anxiety and worry often require additional effort to complete tasks, rendering their performance inefficient. Inefficient information processing in anxiety is evident by enlarged amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential (ERP) elicited after errors during simple reaction time tasks. Although enlarged ERN among worriers is well documented, few studies have examined the effects of interventions aimed at reducing it. Thus, it is...
Show moreIndividuals with excessive anxiety and worry often require additional effort to complete tasks, rendering their performance inefficient. Inefficient information processing in anxiety is evident by enlarged amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN), an event-related brain potential (ERP) elicited after errors during simple reaction time tasks. Although enlarged ERN among worriers is well documented, few studies have examined the effects of interventions aimed at reducing it. Thus, it is unknown whether the ERN could be used to gauge anxiety treatment effects on information processing. The current study aimed to address this gap by recording ERPs among worried undergraduates following an expressive writing exercise (n=18) or a control writing condition (n=16). Expressive writing entails writing about one's deepest thoughts and feelings about a particular event, which can free up cognitive resources and promote more efficient performance among anxious individuals. I predicted that by off-loading worries and freeing up resources, worried individuals in the expressive writing condition would demonstrate reduced ERN and equivalent performance compared to those in the control condition, indicative of more efficient performance. Results supported these predictions. Moreover, a related ERP reflective of conflict-related cognitive control (N2) was also reduced in the expressive writing condition. These results suggest that error- and conflict- related brain activity during simple tasks may be promising markers of treatment response among individuals with clinical anxiety.
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