Adult Anxiety
Tal Eliyahu, None
Research assistant, undergraduate student
Hunter College, City University of New York
New York, New York
David L. Yap, M.A.
Graduate Student
Hunter College, City University of New York
New York, New York
Evelyn Behar, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Hunter College, City University of New York
New York, New York
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by various symptoms, the most important of which is excessive and uncontrollable worry. Individuals with GAD engage in worry when they encounter stressful situations, although the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon have been a matter of debate. Several theoretical models have been proposed to explain worrisome thinking, and all of these models focus on the avoidance of emotional experiences (Behar et al., 2007). For example, the avoidance theory of GAD proposes that worry serves an experiential avoidance function by inhibiting somatic and emotional activation during anxious experiences (Borkovec et al., 2004). Alternatively, if worry does lead to somatic activation (Hofmann et al., 2005), anxiety sensitivity (Reiss et al., 1991) may predict which individuals go on to experience distress. More recently, the contrast avoidance model (CAM) asserted that worry generates negative somatic and affective experience, and that this helps worriers avoid a steep increase in negative emotion (Newman & Llera, 2011).
A modest number of studies have shown support for the CAM. For example, Llera & Newman (2014) found that worry did not suppress negative affect, but rather increased it from baseline and sustained it during subsequent exposure to feared stimuli. Furthermore, participants with GAD subjectively reported that worry helped them cope with the feared stimuli. Importantly, the self-report measure used in these studies to assess whether participants use worry to cope with negative emotional contrasts may have inadvertently led participants to endorse such reasons. Bauer et al. (2020) extended these findings by showing that contrast avoidance moderated the relationship between academic stressors and worry. To date, however, no investigations have directly compared experiential avoidance, anxiety sensitivity, and contrast avoidance as potential moderators of the relationship between anticipated negative affect and worry.
The current study compares these three models by examining these three variables (experiential avoidance, anxiety sensitivity, contrast avoidance) as moderators of the relationship between anticipated negative affect and worry. We collected data from a large nationally representative sample (N=205) of adults. At Time 1, we administered the Brief Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire, the Anxiety Sensitivity Index, and the Contrast Avoidance Questionnaire as measures of these three proposed moderators. Additionally, we used the PANAS-X to assess anticipated negative affect (NA) for the upcoming week. At Time 2, we measured momentary worrisome thinking three times a day for seven days. We will examine whether the relationship between Time 1 anticipated NA and Time 2 worrisome thinking is moderated by the three proposed variables of interest (experiential avoidance, anxiety sensitivity, contrast avoidance). Because no prior investigations have compared these three variables, these analyses will be exploratory in nature as there is not a sufficient empirical or theoretical body of literature on which to base predictions.