Prospective intolerance of uncertainty is associated with maladaptive temporal distribution of avoidance responses: An extension of Flores, López, Vervliet, and Cobos (2018)
| Autor: | Bram Vervliet, Pedro L. Cobos, Francisco J. López, Amanda Flores |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
Male
050103 clinical psychology media_common.quotation_subject Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Avoidance response Anxiety 050105 experimental psychology Correlation Young Adult Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) medicine Avoidance Learning Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Prospective Studies media_common 05 social sciences Multilevel model Uncertainty Extinction (psychology) Explained variation Compulsive disorders Anxiety Disorders Psychiatry and Mental health Clinical Psychology Temperament Female medicine.symptom Psychology Clinical psychology |
| Zdroj: | Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry. 68 |
| ISSN: | 1873-7943 |
| Popis: | Background and objectives Excessive maladaptive avoidance has been claimed to be one of the mechanisms through which intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may play its causal role in the development and maintenance of several anxiety and compulsive disorders. Consistently, Flores et al. (2018) found that individuals with higher Prospective IU (P-IU), a specific IU subfactor, display excessive avoidance response repetitions in a free-operant discriminative task to avoid an aversive noise. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that P-IU not only predicts the amount of avoidance responses but also how well the temporal distribution of such responses fits the temporal distribution of threats. Methods Further correlation and hierarchical regression analysis of Flores et al.‘s (2018) data served to test this hypothesis. We evaluated two aspects of the temporal distribution of responses: a) for how long participants were performing the responses; b) the behavioral discrimination between threatening and safe time periods. Results The results showed that scoring high in P-IU was positively associated with longer periods of time dedicated to avoiding and with worse behavioral discrimination between threatening and safe time periods. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that later addition of inhibitory intolerance of uncertainty and trait anxiety did not significantly improved the explained variance. Limitations Our results are exclusively based on the use of a low-cost avoidance response, and the present study does not clarify the precise mechanisms that lead high P-IU people to engage in non-optimal avoidance response distribution through time. Conclusions These results suggest that excessive avoidance is also driven by uncertainty of threat timing and highlight the relevance of P-IU as a vulnerability factor for excessive and outspread avoidance behaviors. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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