The importance of cognitive styles as psychological antecedents of psychopathology has gained increasing acceptance over the past 2 decades. Although ample research has explored cognitive styles that confer vulnerability to depression, cognitive styles that confer vulnerability to anxiety have received considerably less attention. In the present investigation, we examined the looming maladaptive style (LMS) as a cognitive style that functions as a danger schema to produce specific vulnerability to anxiety, but not to depression. In 4 studies, we examined the psychometric properties of a revised measure of the LMS, its predictive utility, and its effects on threat-related schematic processing. Results provided evidence for the validity of the LMS and indicated that it predicts anxiety and schematic processing of threat over and above the effects of other cognitive appraisals of threat, even in individuals who are currently nonanx-Now I moved like a man pursued-pursued by the clock, by the ghastly advance of numbers. The earth turned, inexorably, the hour was approaching.-Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
Three groups of psychiatric patients in a veterans general hospital were tested under research, transfer, and discharge instructional sets. Differences in selfreported deviance among the groups are interpreted within an impression management framework for the information they reveal about patients' motivational orientations toward transfer and discharge as hospitalization outcomes. Patients were of greatest accord in wanting to avoid transfer. Orientation toward discharge varied among patient subgroups. Shifts in the level of presented deviance were similar for all dimensions but occurred significantly (p < .05) only for psychopathology. Differential levels of presented deviance among subgroups are interpreted in terms of corresponding differences in judged appropriateness for patienthood.
Considerable research has supported links between disrupted parental bonding, attachment insecurity, and psychopathology. Still, few studies have attempted to integrate these findings within a broader cognitive theory of anxiety. Two studies are presented that examine the links between cognitive vulnerability to anxiety (i.e., the Looming Maladaptive Style: LMS) and parental bonding (Study 1) and perceived parental attachment orientations during childhood (Study 2). Results of Study 1 suggest that low levels of maternal overprotection and high levels of paternal overprotection significantly predict LMS scores, beyond the effects of current anxious and depressive symptoms. Results of Study 2 suggest that retrospective reports of maternal attachment insecurity are associated with significantly higher LMS scores, anxious and depressive symptoms, adult romantic attachment insecurity, and potentially high-risk relationship behaviors. These results are interpreted from the perspective of the Looming Vulnerability Model of anxiety and may increase understanding of the linkage between childhood developmental antecedents and cognitive risk for anxiety.
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