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

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a chronic illness characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry. GAD affects roughly 5% of Canadians, and is associated with elevated use of health services, decreased work productivity, and coronary heart disease. Individuals with GAD experience their worry as overwhelming and often report that it makes concentration extremely difficult. It has been proposed that excessive worry is maintained by two attention processes. One is a heightened bias or sensitivity to threatening information. The other is a decreased ability to control attention, or to shift attention away from a worry spiral and back to the task at hand. Attention Bias Modification (ABM) was designed to help people train their attention away from threat and towards neutral information instead. The Attention Training Technique (ATT) aims to train attentional control in worriers. Preliminary evidence suggests that ABM and the ATT are successful in reducing anxiety and worry in people who worry excessively; however, the two interventions have never been compared in such a population. This next step is important so that clinicians can determine which interventions to recommend to clients. This study will be the first to compare the effects of ABM and ATT to a control condition in people with GAD, on worry and attention. It is predicted that relative to control, ABM and ATT will both be associated with a reduction in worry, attention bias, and attention control, with the ATT being more effective. It is also predicted that attention control improvement will be responsible for improvement in worry. These hypotheses will be tested by randomly assigning participants to engage in 12-minutes of ABM, ATT, or listening to a recording of sounds (control condition), once at the lab and then for six consecutive days at home, and monitoring changes before, during, and after the interventions.