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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
If Or When? Uncertainty's Role In Anxious Anticipation, Kenneth P. Bennett
If Or When? Uncertainty's Role In Anxious Anticipation, Kenneth P. Bennett
Theses and Dissertations
Uncertainty is often associated with subjective distress and a potentiated anxiety response. Occurrence uncertainty (OU), or the inability to predict if a threat will occur, has never been compared experimentally with temporal uncertainty (TU), or the inability to predict when a threat will occur. The current study aimed to 1) directly compare the eye-blink startle responsivity of OU and TU, 2) develop a more effective task for isolating uncertain anticipation, and 3) better understand the relationship between individual differences in the intolerance of uncertainty and uncertain anticipation startle responsivity. The novel study showed that OU anticipation is more anxiety provoking …
Neural Circuitry Underlying The Intrusion Of Task-Irrelevant Threat Into Working Memory In Anxiety, Daniel Stout
Neural Circuitry Underlying The Intrusion Of Task-Irrelevant Threat Into Working Memory In Anxiety, Daniel Stout
Theses and Dissertations
Dispositional anxiety is an important risk factor for the development of anxiety and other psychological disorders. Symptoms commonly expressed by highly anxious individuals include intrusive memories, uncertainty, and worry — all occurring in the absence of immediate threat. This raises the possibility that anxious individuals have difficulty governing threat’s access to working memory, the mental workspace where goal-related information is actively retained for guiding on-going behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while 81 subjects completed a well-validated working memory task, I show that threat-related and neutral distracters unnecessarily gain access to working memory, as evidenced by increased neural activity …