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

Effective Cognitive-Behavioural treatment (CBT) protocols have been developed for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), however research demonstrates that 30% of affected individuals do not fully benefit from treatment. Furthermore, many affected individuals do not seek treatment or do not have access to treatment and as a result, experience continued impairment in functioning and significant distress in their daily lives. As such, for my PhD research I plan to develop and evaluate the utility of an innovative treatment tool to decrease threat interpretation biases that are prevalent among individuals with GAD. Given the compelling support for the use of a computerized Interpretation Modification Program (IMP) in the treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder, I am very optimistic about the use of such a program for GAD. The computerized IMP is unique in that it targets more automatic information processing styles related to both a benign bias and a threat bias. Furthermore, the program takes approximately 10 minutes to complete and therefore has the potential to become a widely accessed and rapidly completed treatment tool to enhance current Cognitive-Behavioural Treatment protocols. In an effort to make the program as effective in treatment as possible, an additional objective of my research is to investigate whether or not anxious individuals benefit more from an individualized IMP (targeting specific domains of worry indicated by the client) compared to a generalized IMP (targeting all 10 domains of worry, commonly cited in the literature on GAD). This research will not only have important implications for targets of treatments, it also has the potential to result in establishing an easily administered and widely used therapy tool in treating generalized anxiety.