ATTENTIONAL BIAS AND AGORAPHOBIC AVOIDANCE - THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE-STYLE

Research has suggested that clinically anxious individuals tend to exhibit an attentional bias in processing threat-relevant information. Agoraphobics, in particular, have demonstrated consistent patterns of attention deployment variously described as fear stimulus generalization and hysterical cognitive style. The present study was designed to identify attentional and affective mediators of agoraphobic behavior using recent guidelines for information-processing research with anxiety-disordered populations. Ten adult outpatients meeting DSM-III-R/DIS criteria for panic disorder with agoraphobic avoidance and ten patients diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) were identified from 85 consecutive referrals. The GAD patients constituted a psychiatric control group. All subjects participated in a sequence of diagnostic interviews and completed a battery of tests that included the Embedded Figures Test (a measure of perceptual field dependence), WAIS-R "perceptual-organizational" factor subtests, and the SCL-90-R. Results showed that perceptual field dependence and phobic symptomatology were significant predictors of agoraphobia accounting for 86% of the variance. Overall correct classification of cases into diagnostic groups was 95%. Contrary to previous findings, phobic anxiety was found to be a distinct feature of the syndrome, and agoraphobics did not demonstrate significantly greater psychopathology than GAD patients. The results were interpreted within the framework of current information-processing heuristics for anxiety disorders. © 1991.