Thinking Traps 105
in which they were held to very high standards. The research-
ers examined what participants were thinking and feeling
throughout the whole experiment. The results revealed that
those with SA D engaged in post- event rumination to a
greater extent than did those without SA D. Furthermore,
the more threatening the participants perceived the speech
task to be, the more they ruminated. Even though anxiety is
often a future- oriented experience, repetitive negative
thinking can both precede and follow threatening events or
situations.
Repetitive Negative Thinking and Panic
D i s o r d e r (P D)Imagine experiencing the most intense surge of fear you
have ever felt. It causes a psychological and physical reaction
that affects your whole body. W hen anxiety reaches such an
extreme, some people think they are having a heart attack!
These episodes of anxiety, also known as panic attacks,
consist of accelerated heart rate, difficulty breathing, trem-
bling hands, fear of losing control, and even out- of- body
experiences.
Panic attacks can occur in many different anxiety disor-
ders, but some people experience them out of the blue on a
frequent basis. W hen this happens, a diagnosis of panic
disorder (PD) might be assigned. One of the key features of
PD is prolonged worry about when the next panic attack
might occur and what the panic attacks might mean. In one
study (Cucchi et al. 2012), people experiencing PD and non-
anxious individuals were administered a variety of assess-
ments, including measures that appraised their reasons for
worrying. It was found that, compared with nonanxious