Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a chronic illness characterized by excessive worry, resulting in significant social and occupational impairment. GAD affects approximately 8.7% of Canadians over their lifetime, and is associated with reduced work productivity, economic loss, and elevated use of health services. As the least successfully treated anxiety disorder, more efficacious treatments that lead to full and sustained recovery are needed in order to relieve personal and societal burdens of GAD. Self-compassion (SC), defined as a kind, understanding, and non-judgemental attitude toward oneself, has been identified as a potential ameliorative factors for GAD. SC is inversely related to pathological worry and GAD symptom severity; however, little is known about how SC may lead to improvements in worry and GAD symptoms. Inflated sense of responsibility, perfectionism, and self-efficacy are self-concept constructs implicated in GAD that perpetuate worry and self-criticism, and that a self-compassionate attitude may improve. The proposed study is a longitudinal mediation analysis that will examine these constructs as mediators in the relationships between SC and worry/GAD severity. Individuals with GAD will receive a 3-week intervention intended to increase SC. It is predicted that changes in SC will inversely relate to changes in sense of responsibility and perfectionism, and positively relate to changes in self-efficacy. It is also predicted that changes in these constructs will mediate the relationships between SC and worry/GAD severity. This study is an important step in solidifying SC as a therapeutic variable in GAD. Findings could inform greater focus on SC or implementation of adjunct treatments that foster SC in order to improve treatment outcomes for GAD.