Information processing biases in generalized anxiety disorder

Abstract

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by the repeated experience of chronic, excessive and uncontrollable worry regarding a range of different topics. Such individuals report particular difficulty controlling worry once it is initiated. Information processing models of GAD propose that the way in which anxious individuals process threatening information has a causal role in initiating and maintaining worry. There is substantial evidence that individuals with GAD and high levels of worry and anxiety demonstrate a threatening attentional bias, whereby they preferentially attend to threatening information in their environment. There is also substantial evidence that individuals with GAD demonstrate a threatening interpretive bias, in which they favour the threatening meanings of emotionally ambiguous events or information. Recent research has indicated that it may be possible to train high anxious individuals to adopt more benign attentional and interpretive biases, and furthermore, that this may cause their level of anxiety and worry to decrease. There is far less evidence that anxious individuals show enhanced memory for threatening information. However, high levels of anxiety and worry have been associated with reduced working memory capacity (a limited capacity store needed to engage in different tasks and switch between tasks), due to worry taking up limited resources. This may make it more difficult for individuals with GAD to redirect their thoughts away from worry and onto more benign topics, therefore causing their worry to persist.