Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a chronic condition marked by excessive worry. GAD is common and is associated with many other illnesses. Relative to people without an anxiety disorder, people with GAD have higher rates of unemployment, and overutilize the Canadian healthcare system. Given this, it is concerning that the current psychological treatments for GAD are failing to reduce symptoms for up to 40% of treatment completers. This can be addressed by examining ways to improve the effectiveness of GAD treatment. People with GAD worry about catastrophic scenarios, and thus, avoid imagining such scenarios clearly. Avoidance maintains all forms of anxiety, including GAD. Confronting the object or situation that is being avoided is an effective way to reduce anxiety. In GAD, the object or situation being avoided is mental images of feared scenarios that have not yet occurred, so these mental images must be confronted in the imagination (called imaginal exposure [IE]). IE is currently used to treat GAD, and studies show that it reduces worry. For my Master's research I compared the impact of imagining the same worrisome scenario during IE to imagining several different scenarios. Confronting the same scenario reduced GAD symptoms over time, while confronting different ones did not. To further test factors that may improve IE, I have proposed two studies. Study 1 is based on the finding that people with GAD have great difficulty tolerating uncertainty. This study will test the effectiveness of asking people with GAD to imagine scenarios that are purposely uncertain. Study 2 is based on research that suggests that talking aloud may evoke more emotion than writing. This study will examine whether making an audio-recording of a feared scenario and repeatedly listening to it is more effective than repeatedly writing about it. The findings of the proposed research will be used to refine how IE is conducted in practice and may improve the success rate of GAD treatme