Cognitive vulnerability to anxiety in the stress generation process: Interaction between the Looming Cognitive Style and Anxiety Sensitivity

Interpersonal Competence and Daily Stress Generation in Individuals with Avoidant Personality Disorder Symptoms

“…Recent stress generation research has questioned the specificity of this theory to depression (e.g., Allen & Rapee, 2009;Bender, Alloy, Sylvia, Urosevic, & Abramson, 2010;Riskind, Black, & Shahar, 2010;Wu & Anderson, 2010). Personality disorders have received relatively little attention in stress generation research.…”

“…AVPD symptoms are associated with anxiety, with some researchers conceptualizing AVPD as a severe form of social phobia (Holt, Heimberg, & Hope, 1992). Recently, stress generation theory has been supported in anxious populations (Allen & Rapee, 2009;Riskind et al, 2010). Given that individuals with elevated AVPD symptoms often experience feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and expectations of social rejection (American Psychiatric Association, 2000), AVPD is likely associated with self-cricitism, a punitive evaluation of the self which can involve relational and/or self-definitional themes (Shahar, Soffer, & Gilboa-Shechtman, 2008) and a fear of negative evaluation of social interaction skills (Cox, Walker, Ehns, & Karpinski, 2002).…”

Cognitive vulnerability to comorbidity: Looming cognitive style and depressive cognitive style as synergistic predictors of anxiety and depression symptoms

“…According to the Looming Vulnerability Model of anxiety, individuals who are cognitively vulnerable to anxiety have a looming cognitive style (LCS; Riskind, Black, & Shahar, 2010;Riskind et al, 2000). LCS is a type of cognitive threat overestimation bias that specifies individuals who are cognitively vulnerable to anxiety imagine real or perceived threat stimuli as rapidly and dynamically approaching and increasing in threat.…”

“…We predicated this synergism hypothesis on the assumption that each vulnerability factor augments the effect of the other in creating stress and depleting coping resources. This could make it more difficult for individuals to cope with or recover from problems, manage their emotions, or prevent themselves from generating further stressful events (Riskind, Black, & Shahar, 2010). As a result, we expected that the ability of individuals to cope would be synergistically impaired when they have compounded vulnerabilities, which could result in increased generation of symptoms.…”

Alterations of the attentional networks in patients with anxiety disorders

“…Many efforts have been made in developing adequate therapies and theories highlighting the factors that make us vulnerable to the above-mentioned disorders. Trait-anxiety, disgust sensitivity (McDonald, Hartman, & Vrana, 2008), the Looming Cognitive Style (Riskind, Black, & Shahar, 2010), or experiential avoidance (Berman, Wheaton, McGrath, & Abramowitz, 2010) have been considered among these factors, most of which are closely related to attentional or regulatory processes.…”