Topic
Anxiety research, explained
9 open-access anxiety studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Do socially anxious people see neutral faces as threatening?
After reading a negative sentence about themselves, socially anxious students showed stronger sustained brain responses to, and more negative ratings of, perfectly neutral faces.
- How do anxiety and fear alter our perception of time?
While being in an anxious state makes people underestimate the passage of time, experiencing acute fear has no measurable effect on time perception.
- Do socially anxious people look at, then away from, a feared person?
After a virtual person became linked to social rejection, highly socially anxious students first looked at that person faster and then increasingly looked away from them, while low-anxious students' gaze did not distinguish the feared and safe person.
- How do worry and good moments shape anxiety in people with GAD?
In people with generalised anxiety disorder, anxiety rose less when a worry episode followed another worry than when it followed a good moment, fitting the idea that worry is used to avoid sudden emotional drops.
- Does Social Anxiety Make Us Over-Interpret What Others Think?
People with social anxiety only over-interpret others' thoughts and intentions during stressful, self-referential social interactions, rather than as a general, constant habit.
- Do worry and metacognition drive anxiety during therapy?
In patients treated for stubborn anxiety disorders, worry and constantly scanning for threat sat at the centre of the week-to-week web of symptoms in both therapies, more than the specific catastrophic thoughts that CBT targets.
- Does feeling threatened help or hurt finding your way back?
Under the threat of a shock, more anxious people got better at retracing a route back to its start, while less anxious people got worse.
- How personal memory details affect learning in anxiety
Anxiety patients who struggle to recall specific details of their own lives also show a poorer ability to learn the difference between safe and predictive cues.
- How sleep loss boosts anxiety: an EEG study
Sleep deprivation increases temporary anxiety by altering brain wave patterns that control threat attention and emotional regulation.