Thinking Traps 103
has become increasingly relevant. Emotion dysregulation
and harmful response styles have been considered potential
transdiagnostic factors. For now, we will focus on repetitive
negative thinking as a core feature found across different
types of anxiety.
Repetitive Negative Thinking and
Generalized A nxiety Disorder (GA D)The cardinal symptom of GA D is uncontrollable, exces-
sive worry. Many theories have conceptualized worry as a
verbal thought process that temporarily dampens distress-
ing emotions and the threatening imagery associated with
future threats. Contemporary models of GA D and worry
suggest that individuals with GA D use worry not only to
avoid negative emotions but also to mitigate contrasts
between emotions (Newman et al. 2013). Specifically, indi-
viduals with GA D try to avoid contrasts between initial pos-
itive emotions and later negative emotions. In an experiment
conducted by Llera and Newman (2014), participants with
GA D and participants without any form of anxiety were
randomly assigned to experience worrisome, relaxing, or
neutral thoughts before watching scary, sad, or humorous
film clips. Essentially, the researchers wanted to know the
effect of using different emotion regulation strategies on
experiencing an emotional contrast. Indeed, when individu-
als with GA D used worry before being exposed to scary or
sad film clips, they felt more prepared for the upcoming
emotional threat. Because they had been worrying, they
were already in a negative state. The scary or sad film clip
could thus do little to make them feel worse. On the other
hand, when they didn’t use worry and were thus in a neutral