Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by chronic worry and anxiety that result in significant impairment. GAD affects roughly 8.7% of Canadians in their lifetime, and is associated with decreased work productivity and elevated use of healthcare resources. GAD is the least successfully treated anxiety disorder. Chronic worry and anxiety in GAD have been understood as being excessively triggered in response to constant, and false, threat perception. Individuals with GAD engage in behaviours, known as safety behaviours, that they believe protect them from perceived threat (e.g., seeking reassurance from others). However, safety behaviours maintain anxiety by maintaining beliefs that one is only safe because they engage in these behaviours, and preventing individuals from learning that their perceptions of threat are false and their anxiety is unwarranted. Treatments for GAD aim to eliminate unhelpful safety behaviours. However, recent theory proposes that individuals with GAD are chronically anxious because they don't perceive safety around them, which neurobiological evidence indicates is necessary to reduce anxiety. Promoting effective safety perception has been proposed as another goal for GAD treatment. The False Safety Behaviour Elimination Therapy (F-SET) is an effective treatment for anxiety disorders that aims to eliminate safety behaviours. The present study will modify the F-SET so it also promotes safety perception. It is predicted that the modified F-SET will result in greater improvement in anxiety symptoms and functioning for individuals with GAD than the original F-SET. This research aims to augment a promising behavioural treatment to also target an impaired cognitive process -- safety perception -- that maintains worry and anxiety. Findings that support the modified F-SET would increase understandings of how to produce better treatment outcomes for individuals with GAD, which is imperative to reducing the societal burden of the disorder.