The Roles of Emotional Reactivity and Tolerance in Generalized, Social, and Health Anxiety: A Multimethod Exploration
Highlights
► Research implicates heightened emotional reactivity and poor emotional tolerance in anxiety disorders. ► Emotional reactivity and tolerance were assessed using emotional films and a behavioral distress tolerance task. ► Emotional reactivity was related to generalized anxiety symptoms and emotional tolerance was related to social anxiety. ► Symptoms of health anxiety were associated with anxious response to a frustrating task.
Section snippets
Participants
One-hundred and twenty-two participants were recruited through introductory psychology courses at a large southeastern university and completed this study as partial fulfillment of course requirements. All participants provided written informed consent for participating in the experiment. The sample was 59% female and ranged in age from 18 to 30 years (M = 18.78, SD = 1.3). The sample consisted of diverse ethnic groups: 77.9% were White (not Hispanic), 8.2% were Black (not Hispanic), 11.5% were
Correlational Analyses of Symptom Measures
The PSWQ was significantly and positively correlated with the SHAI (r = .35) and BFNE (r = .36), p's < .001, and the SHAI and BFNE were also correlated with each other (r = .26, p < .01). The DASS-dep was significantly correlated with the PSWQ (r = .25), BFNE (r = .36), SHAI (r = .25), and DASS-anx (r = .41), p's < .01. The DASS-anx was also correlated with the BFNE (r = .31) and the SHAI (r = .48), p's < .001. The DASS-anx was marginally correlated with the PSWQ (r = .22, p = .017).
Analyses of Response to Emotional Films
Average peak mood and emotional tolerance
Discussion
The present study investigated the relationships between anxiety symptoms and emotional reactivity and DT using multiple assessment methodologies. Though generalized, social, and health anxiety symptoms were correlated with each other, specific associations between task performance and each symptom emerged. When both measures of generalized and social anxiety were entered simultaneously in a regression model, generalized anxiety symptoms, but not social anxiety symptoms, accounted for unique
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