Empirical Status of the Cognitive Model 75
to their anxious concerns. This cognitive bias for threat estimation appears relevant to
most of the anxiety disorders, although it is still debatable whether it is specific only to
anxiety. The research on looming cognitive style clearly indicates that overestimating
the proximity or impending nature of danger is a critical aspect of biased threat evalua-
tion that potentiates the anxious state.
It is likely that highly anxious individuals generate the same types of cognitive
errors that we see in depression. Catastrophizing is well known in panic disorder, but it
is likely that dichotomous thinking, selective abstraction, magnification/minimization,
overgeneralization, and other forms of rigid and absolutistic thinking are prominent
in all the anxiety disorders. Research is needed to determine whether some of these
cognitive errors are specific to anxiety- relevant concerns and what role they play in the
persistence of fear activation. It would also be helpful to move beyond static paper-and-
pencil measures of cognitive errors to “online assessment” of thought content during
fear provocation.
At this time we have no information on the role of cognitive errors in the dimin-
ished processing of safety cues that is considered an important feature of fear activation.
We assume that if cognitive processing errors can lead to an overestimation of threat,
then this same cognitive processing style might lead to an underestimation of safety.
This latter proposition, however, must await empirical investigation.
Clinician Guideline 3.4
Repeated experiences with situations involving varying levels of impending threat that dis-
confirm anxious individuals’ exaggerated threat expectancies are critical in modifying the
erroneous thinking style that contributes to the persistence of the anxious state.Hypothesis 5. Negative Interpretation of Anxiety
Highly anxious individuals will generate more negative and threatening interpretations of
their subjective anxious feelings and symptoms than individuals experiencing low levels of
an xiety.
In the cognitive model (see Figure 2.1) increased autonomic or physiological arousal
is another prominent feature of threat mode activation. Hypothesis 5, however, refers to
the cognitive processes associated with physiological arousal. It is proposed that highly
anxious individuals will perceive their heightened arousal, anxious feelings, and other
somatic symptoms of anxiety as more threatening and unacceptable than low anxious
individuals. It is also expected that this “fear of fear” (Chambless & Gracely, 1989) will
be more evident during highly anxious states and will motivate individuals to terminate
the fear program.
Beck et al. (1985, 2005) identified another aspect of this negative interpretation of
anxiet y, “emotional reasoning,” in which the state of feeling anxious is itself interpreted
as evidence that danger must be present. Later Arntz, Rauer, and van den Hout (1995)
referred to this as “ex- consequentia reasoning” which involves the fallacious proposi-
tion “If I feel anxious, there must be danger” (p. 917). They found that spider phobic,
panic, social phobic, and other anxiety disorder patients but not nonclinical controls