The forgotten factor in anxiety disorders: the action tendency
Psychologist Dr Tom Beckers received a Vidi grant of €800,000 for his research into the behavioural science component of anxiety disorders.
Little is known about the mechanisms that link individual susceptibility to the development of anxiety disorders. Psychologist Dr Tom Beckers received a Vidi grant of €800,000 for his research into the behavioural science component of these disorders.Anxiety is a useful emotion. It protects people from dangerous situations. But for as much as 30 per cent of the population, at a certain point this useful sense of anxiety develops into an anxiety disorder, also known as dysfunctional anxiety. There still is no clear answer to the question of precisely how anxiety disorders come about. According to Tom Beckers, this can be partly be attributed to limited laboratory-based research into anxiety conditioning. ‘At the moment we're looking in particular at the more controlled physical responses of test subjects, by measuring skin conductivity for example, and at subjective factors such as the way people describe their own anxiety. The problem with this is that people who are naturally anxious tend to suppress their emotional expressions. Also, we may not always be studying the most relevant situations for anxiety conditioning.'
Impulsive expressions of anxiety
That's why Beckers aims to focus on impulsive expressions of anxiety in his research. These might include an increase in the blink reflex during anxiety-inducing situations. ‘That kind of reaction is less easily influenced by the subject and therefore produces a far more reliable impression.'Beckers is also looking to measure unobservable impulsive avoidance behaviour. To do this, he's using a so-called reaction-time task. Subjects are shown photographs, one of which had previously come with the warning of a shock. The objective is to make a little figure run to the photographs as quickly as possible, or to make him run away. ‘My hypothesis is that moving towards the photo that "caused" the shock conflicts with the impulsive tendency to run away from it. I expect therefore that particularly those subjects who are susceptible to the development of anxiety disorders would react more slowly in that scenario. After all, they're more sensitive to displays of avoidance behaviour.'
Dysfunctional learning process
According to Beckers, the standard forms of anxiety conditioning are perhaps not the most suitable for research into the development of anxiety disorders. ‘If you know that you'll get a shock when you see a particular photo, you'll develop an anxiety towards it. That's perfectly healthy and normal. An anxiety disorder, though, is a dysfunctional learning process, where anxiety is no longer healthy or protective. I want to use more complex and ambiguous forms of anxiety conditioning, which hopefully can reveal more about the development of dysfunctional anxiety. After all, in real life the circumstances in which we learn anxiety are often much more complex.'Internal sensations
As an example, Beckers offers a scenario in a busy shopping centre. Someone is hurrying past the shops and experiencing a range of internal sensations (pounding heart, panting) and various external sensations (busy crowds). Suddenly he suffers a panic attack. From that moment, this person is excessively anxious of internal sensations, given that he associates these with panic attacks, so he refers himself for treatment.‘During therapy, internal sensations are stimulated, and the person learns that these need not lead to a panic attack. For some people the problems stop there, but others may go on to attribute their anxiety to something else, and link their panic attack to the external factors; that is, the busy crowds. As a result, they can develop agoraphobia. In other words, the symptoms shift. And although my research, in principle, is looking for an answer to the fundamental question of which mechanism lies at the root of individual differences in the development of anxiety disorders, this knowledge can certainly be relevant to the treatment of people with such disorders.'
Beckers' research will run for five years, and starts in the first quarter of 2010. He's carrying out the research with two PhD students who are starting their doctoral programmes in 2010 and 2011.
Author: Esther van Bochove, FMG Communication department