Emotion regulation among individuals classified with and without generalized anxiety disorder☆
Section snippets
Participants
In the present study, 138 undergraduate and graduate students (111 women) participated. Participants were screened for the presence or absence of GAD according to the procedures described below. Overall, 33 participants (32 women) were classified as having GAD; 105 participants (79 women) were classified as control participants.
Measures
The Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ; Meyer, Miller, Metzger, & Borkovec, 1990) is a self-report measure of the excessiveness, uncontrollability and pervasiveness of
Preliminary analyses
As shown in Table 1, the GAD-classified and control groups did not differ by age, t(136) = 1.19, p = ns, d = .20, ethnicity, χ2(3,N = 138) = 1.16, p = ns, phi = .09, or marital status, χ2(2,N = 138) = 1.82, p = ns, phi = .12. However, a significant gender difference was found, χ2(1,N = 138) = 7.54, p < .05, phi = .23. Although the GAD literature suggests a gender difference in prevalence rates favoring women (Wittchen, Zhao, Kessler, & Eaton, 1994), the gender differences in the current study were larger than expected.
Discussion
The present study lends partial support for Mennin et al.'s (2004) model and further elucidates the psychological processes involved in GAD. Consistent with the model, individuals classified as having GAD rated their most emotional experience of the day as more intense than control participants. Previous research has found more intense emotional experiencing among individuals with GAD according to responses to the Impulse Strength subscale of the Berkley Expressivity Questionnaire (BEQ; Gross &
Acknowledgements
The data reported herein are from the first author's doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of the second author. The authors wish to thank Deena Sadiky and David Gomez for their help with data collection. The authors also wish to thank Dr. Randy Fingerhut for his helpful input.
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Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Washington, DC, November 2005.