Cognitive, Behavioural, Physiological, and Subjective Outcomes of Anxiety Regulation

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We all experience situations involving intense fear or anxiety, whether prior to giving a speech, hearing a car horn as we cross the street, or taking a difficult exam. Like all emotions, anxiety includes what we think, what we feel, and what we do. Emotion regulation refers to strategies people use to change the intensity, duration, and type of emotion experienced. Different strategies have different effects on these emotional components. Although we know quite a bit about which emotion regulation strategies work when, we know relatively little about how they work. For example, researchers found that one strategy, cognitive reappraisal, reduces state anxiety; however, limited research has tested underlying cognitive mechanisms. Many of our day-to-day emotions and relevant behaviour are caused by automatic thinking at least as much as by controlled thinking. For example, people may feel afraid when they hear a car horn honk—and hopefully jump out of the way!—without taking time to decide whether they are actually in danger and need to react. Although some findings suggest that this automatic thinking predicts more spontaneous outcomes (e.g., heart rate), and more controlled cognition (e.g., self-report) predicts more controlled outcomes (e.g., behavioural approach), others fail to find such effects or demonstrate opposite effects. There is preliminary evidence that the stronger the automatic associations (for example, between an angry face and rejection), the harder it is to look away from anxiety-relevant stimuli. This “attentional bias” may then increase anxiety and fear and lead to maladaptive behaviour (e.g., avoiding giving a speech, even though it is a job requirement). This pattern can make automatic associations even stronger, resulting in a vicious cycle. My research program seeks to advance our understanding of cognitive mechanisms (i.e., attention bias, automatic associations) underlying anxiety regulation. Specifically, I apply multi-method approaches to examine how anxiety regulation strategies impact cognitive processes, and in turn, state anxiety and behaviour. My long-term goal is to understand how adaptive (vs. maladaptive) anxiety regulation influences the experience of anxiety, including anxiety-related associations, self-reported anxiety, attentional bias, behavioural approach, and physiological arousal. My short-term goals involve assessing existing relationships among cognitive, behavioural, subjective, and physiological measures of anxiety, testing the impact of specific anxiety regulation strategies on these outcomes, and investigating moderating effects of contextual variables such as working memory capacity, arousal, and emotion regulation efficacy. This program fills an important gap in the literature by clarifying not only the various anxiety regulation components, but also the cognitive mechanisms by which this process operates.