Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders

Empirical Status of the Cognitive Model 65

on an evaluation of stimulus threat value (Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998). An apparent
hypervigilance for threat may be due to any combination of facilitated threat detection,
impaired threat disengagement, or subsequent avoidance of threat cues with prolonged
exposure. The following clinical implication can be drawn from this research.

Clinician Guideline 3.1

Clinically anxious and vulnerable individuals automatically orient toward threat without

conscious awareness of this tendency. Some form of attentional training might help counter

this orienting bias.

Hypothesis 2. Diminished Attentional Processing of Safety

Anxious individuals will exhibit an automatic attentional shift away from safety cues that
are incongruent with their dominant threat concerns, whereas nonanxious individuals will
show an automatic attentional shift toward safety cues.

The selective attentional bias for threat reflects a narrowing of attention that accom-
panies emotional arousal (Barlow, 2002). “Narrowing of attention” is based on Easter-
brook’s (1959) proposal that increased emotional arousal will cause a reduction in the
range of cues utilized (processed) by an organism. From an information- processing per-
spective, this means the higher the anxiety level, the more one’s attention will become
narrowly focused on a restricted range of mood- congruent stimuli, thereby causing a
reduction in the scope of stimulus processing (Barlow, 2002; Wells & Matthews, 1994;
see also Mathews & Mackintosh, 1998). In the present context this means that highly
anxious individuals should exhibit the greatest amount of attentional narrowing for
threat- relevant stimuli, with little attentional resources remaining to process informa-

Personal Threat

Temporality Relevance Intensity

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Exaggerated

Attentional Threat Bias

Normal Attentional

Threat Bias

Attentional Threat Bias

Absent

Immediate Personal

High

figure 3.2. Schematic representation of threat gradient for attentional bias.