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

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a highly prevalent, chronic, and difficult-to-treat condition characterized by excessive worry and anxiety. Research has shown that people with GAD avoid thinking about feared situations in a clear way in an attempt to keep anxiety and other uncomfortable emotions at bay. However, this avoidance is actually counterproductive because it intensifies worry and anxiety. Past research has shown that an intervention called written exposure (WE) improves worry. In WE, people counteract their avoidance by fully imagining and processing clear, vivid thoughts of their worst fear coming true. This is accomplished by writing repeatedly and concretely about their worst fear. This study will examine a way to optimize the WE intervention; specifically, whether the addition of an imagery-training (IT) phase can further enhance WE's beneficial effects. Research in other clinical populations has shown that those who have better imagery abilities show larger symptom improvements within exposure-based treatments. For individuals with GAD, imagery ability may be even more important because these individuals report difficulties generating vivid images of their worst fears. Individuals with GAD will be assigned to one of two conditions: (1) WE with imagery training or (2) WE without imagery training. Both conditions will engage in 20-minute WE sessions on 3 consecutive days, but participants in the IT condition will also receive a 15-minute imagery training each day prior to engaging in WE. During IT, individuals will be trained to engage in imagery through different exercises. We hypothesize that the addition of imagery training to WE will lead to greater improvements in GAD symptoms, worry and worry-related difficulties than WE without imagery training. WE has considerable promise as a brief, inexpensive treatment for Canadians with GAD and the proposed experiment examines a novel enhancement of it.