Information-Processing Approaches to Understanding Anxiety Disorders

Date: 2008-09-04

Creator: Richard J. McNally, Hannah E. Reese

Access: Open access

Experimental psychopathologists have used cognitive psychology paradigms to elucidate information-processing biases in the anxiety disorders. A vast literature now suggests that patients with anxiety disorders are characterized by an attentional bias for threatening information and a bias toward threatening interpretations of ambiguous information. A memory bias favoring recall of threatening information occurs in panic disorder, but rarely in other anxiety disorders. New treatments involving the experimental modification of cognitive biases are promising.