The Looming Cognitive Style: A Cognitive Vulnerability for Anxiety Disorders

Abstract

The model of looming vulnerability identifies a cognitive vulnerability factor for anxiety disorders. The looming cognitive style is hypothesized as an overarching cognitive vulnerability to anxiety disorders but is not applicable to depression. The looming cognitive style refers to a tendency to generate, maintain, and attend to internally generated scenarios of increasing danger and rapidly rising risk. Other models of threat appraisal may offer a relatively lifeless distillation of the anxious individual's phenomenological experience. The subjective sense of looming vulnerability is proposed to elicit anxiety, sensitize the individual to signs of movement and threat, bias cognitive processing, and impede habituation to threat stimuli (Riskind, 1997a). It also discriminates anxiety and focal fears from depression. The looming model is presented and relevant empirical evidence is reviewed.