Level of emotional awareness as a differentiating variable between individuals with and without generalized anxiety disorder☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 293 unselected undergraduate students (219 women) who took part in the study for course extra credit. Using the study criteria described below, 73 participants were classified as having GAD and 220 participants were classified as normal controls. The ethnic composition of the sample was 76.5% Caucasian, 13% African American, 3% Asian American, 2.7% Latino/a, 1.4% mixed ethnic heritage, and 3.4% individuals who endorsed “other.” The marital status of the sample was 94.2%
Preliminary analyses
As expected, the GAD group had significantly higher scores on the PSWQ than the control group, t(291) = −12.4, P < .001 (see Table 1). The mean of the GAD group was similar to that observed in treatment-seeking samples (e.g., Borkovec & Costello, 1993). This GAD group also had significantly higher scores on the dimensional score for the GAD-Q-IV than the control group, t(290) = −16.1, P < .001 (see Table 1).
The groups did not differ significantly in age [t(291) = 1.53, ns], ethnicity [χ2(2, N =
Discussion
Contrary to hypotheses, individuals with GAD performed at a significantly higher level of emotional awareness on the LEAS total score than controls. Even when more fine grained analyses of different aspects of the LEAS were examined (i.e., self vs. others; discrete emotion category; level of complexity), the GAD group was consistently rated as higher in emotional awareness than the control group (although these differences were not always statistically significant, the effect sizes were
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 Dr. Frank Gardner for his helpful input and support as a dissertation committee member.
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Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Boston, MA, November, 2003.