104 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
emotional state, they perceived the scary or sad film clip to
be more distressing. The overall results of the study indi-
cated that those with GA D considered worry to be a useful
coping strategy for dealing with drastic changes from posi-
tive to negative experiences, whereas nonanxious individu-
als did not consider worry a useful strategy. This may explain
why many individuals describe worry as useful or produc-
tive. However, we know that prolonged use of worry actually
leads to more anxiety and prevents people from realizing
that experiencing negative emotions and emotional con-
trasts isn’t all that bad.
Repetitive Negative Thinking and Social
A nxiety Disorder (SA D)We already talked about Robert and his experience with
SA D, and this gives us a good template for exploring the role
of repetitive negative thinking in social anxiety. Like GA D,
SA D is associated with anticipatory worry about upcoming
social interactions or performance situations. People often
rehearse what might go wrong, focus on how others might
perceive their performance, and try to predict how they
might feel during different circumstances of the interaction.
In addition to worry, there has been increasing evidence that
those with SA D also engage in post- event rumination. As
we mentioned earlier, this refers to a process in which
socially anxious individuals scrutinize their performance
after the fact. They try to determine how others perceived
them, whether anyone noticed their perceived social blun-
ders, and what their anxiety means about them as a person.
In an experiment by Penney and Abbott (2015), individuals
with or without SA D underwent a threatening speech task