Graham C L Davey

• University of Sussex

The present study examined the causal effect of negative mood on the deployment of as-many-as-can (AMAC) checking stop rules and compulsions. Participants underwent a negative or positive mood induction and subsequently completed self-report measures of AMAC checking stop rules and compulsions. The negative mood group scored significantly higher on...

Background The frequency and severity of mental health problems in student populations have been a growing cause for concern worldwide, and studies have identified measures of a number of mental health symptoms that have been steadily increasing in frequency and intensity over the past 20–25 years. Methods In two studies we investigate the levels...

Background and objectives: The effect of a worry manipulation on the clinical constructs intolerance of uncertainty (IU), negative beliefs about the consequences of worry (NCOW), positive beliefs about the consequences of worry (PCOW), in addition to the emotions anxiety and sadness, was examined. Methods: A non-clinical sample was split into tw...

Emerging evidence suggests that many of the clinical constructs used to help understand and explain obsessive-compulsive (OC) symptoms, and negative mood, may be causally interrelated. One approach to understanding this interrelatedness is a motivational systems approach. This approach suggests that rather than considering clinical constructs and n...

According to theories of embodiment enacting a smile or a frown can positively or negatively influence one’s evaluations, even without awareness of one’s facial activity. While some previous studies found evidence for facial feedback effects, recent replication attempts could not confirm these findings. Are our decisions throughout the day amenable...

This paper outlines a putative pathway for experimental psychopathology research developing psychological models of clinical disorders. The pathway uses established external validity criteria to define the pathway and clarifies the important role that research conducted on healthy participants can play in our understanding of clinical disorders. De...

Excessive and uncontrollable worry is a defining feature of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). An important endeavor in the treatment of pathological worry is to understand why some people are unable to stop worrying once they have started. Worry perseveration is associated with a tendency to deploy goal-directed worry rules (known as “as many as...

Do facial expressions of emotion influence us when not consciously perceived? Methods to investigate this question have typically relied on brief presentation of static images. In contrast, real facial expressions are dynamic and unfold over several seconds. Recent studies demonstrate that gaze contingent crowding (GCC) can block awareness of dynam...

This paper reviews the cognitive, affective and attentional factors that contribute to individual perseverative worry bouts. We describe how automatic biases in attentional and interpretational processes contribute to threat detection and to the inclusion of negative intrusive thoughts into the worry stream typical of the "what if …?" thinking styl...

The present experiment adapted the “Voluntary Facial Action” (VFA) technique (Dimberg & Söderkvist, 2011) to study the effect of facial expressions on the interpretation of ambiguity. This required participants to react with either the zygomatic major muscles (smile) or the corrugator supercilii muscles (frown) when exposed to different stimuli, so...

Perseverative thinking occurs within anxiety disorders. this study examined whether panic-relevant catastrophic misinterpretation of ambiguous bodily sensations occurs immediately on experiencing the sensation, or as a result of iterative perseverative thought processes. Participants were 60 nontreatment-seeking undergraduates. a 2 × 2 mood-as-inpu...

Background & objectives Given the ubiquity of worrying as a consuming and distressing activity at both clinical and sub-clinical levels, it is important to develop theory-driven procedures that address worrying and allow worriers to manage this activity. This paper describes the development and testing of a psychoeducation procedure based on mood-a...

Clinical Psychology, Second Edition offers a comprehensive and an up-to-date introduction to the field. Written by clinical practitioners and researchers, as well as service users who add their personal stories, the book provides a broad and balanced view of contemporary clinical psychology. This new edition has been extensively revised throughout...

Obsessive compulsive disorder is a disabling and distressing mental health problem. This accessible introduction examines OCD's causes, symptoms, diagnosis and treatment, and is richly illustrated with case studies, making it engaging reading for anyone wishing to understand this complex mental health problem.

A series of three experiments was designed to test predictions from a motivational systems approach to understanding the role of clinical constructs in anxiety-based problems. Negative mood, inflated responsibility, and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) were separately manipulated within analog samples to examine their effect on the other two factors...

This review examines the theoretical rationale for conceiving of systematic information processing as a proximal mechanism for perseverative worry. Systematic processing is characterised by detailed, analytical thought about issue-relevant information, and in this way, is similar to the persistent, detailed processing of information that typifies p...

An experiment investigated the effects of depletive and repletive autoshaping schedules on signal-directed behavior in rats. Subjects that experienced a repletive schedule, in which the probability of the conditioned stimulus’s being followed by response-independent food increased throughout the session, exhibited a gradual increase in signal-direc...

After removal of neocortex, rats were found to press a lever more readily than were shamoperated controls when exposed to an autoshaping procedure in which either the movement of a lever (Experiment 1) or its illumination (Experiment 2) was paired with the delivery of food. In both experiments, the apparatus was provided with a second, but nonpredi...

Two experiments investigated the effect of facial expressions on clinically-relevant ambiguity resolution in a nonclinical sample. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of negative facial feedback (frowning) on a basic threat-interpretation bias procedure using a homophone spelling task and found that participants in a frowning condition interpreted...

The current study tested the mood-as-input hypothesis account of perseverative rumination in 25 participants with a diagnosis of major depressive disorder and 25 healthy controls. It also examined the factors underlying mood changes within a bout of rumination and their relations with trait rumination and metacognitive beliefs about rumination. A s...

Three rats were trained to press a lever on a fixed-ratio 3 schedule to obtain a 4-sec burst of radiant heat in a cold environment. Control conditions suggested that this learning was dependent on the contingency between leverpressing and heat reinforcements, and the warming properties of the heat lamp reinforcer. Leverpressing in all subjects was...

Three constructs considered to be important primary beliefs in the pathogenesis of OCD are inflated responsibility, intolerance of uncertainty and thought-action fusion. While there is evidence suggesting that these beliefs/appraisals can influence OCD symptoms, we conducted two experiments to determine whether manipulating aversive intrusive thoug...

We report a meta- and primary data-analysis investigating the efficacy of cognitive therapy (CT) for pathological worry in adults with GAD that includes an analysis of primary data not reported in previous meta-analyses. Eligible studies included those whose participants met the criteria for a diagnosis of GAD and those that used the PSWQ as an out...

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is a construct known to influence catastrophic worry and is often observed in Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Research into the psychological manifestations of GAD suggests IU is associated with worry, but has not confirmed a causal link. The current study investigated the relationship between catastrophic worry...

Previous research has demonstrated that a combination of negative mood and rigorous "as many as can" stop rules can be used to help explain a range of perseverative psychopathologies such as pathological worrying, compulsive checking, and depressive rumination (known as the mood-as-input hypothesis). The aim of the present study was to extend this...

This review analyses the accumulating evidence from psychological, psychophysiological, neurobiological and cognitive studies suggesting that the disease-avoidance emotion of disgust is a predominant emotion experienced in a number of psychopathologies. Current evidence suggests that disgust is significantly related to small animal phobias (particu...

Negative mood is associated with increased worry levels, and also with deployment of a systematic information processing style. An experimental study assessed the potential role of systematic information processing in mediating the facilitative effect of negative mood on worry (e.g. Johnston & Davey, 1997). Participants underwent appropriate vignet...

Mood-as-input hypothesis is a theory of task perseveration that has been applied to the understanding of perseveration across psychopathologies such as pathological worrying, compulsive checking, depressive rumination, and chronic pain. We review 10 years of published evidence from laboratory-based analogue studies and describe their relevance for...

Within one week of surgery, traffic accident patients were compared with a variety of other surgery patients on measures of anxiety, depression, general psychological health and coping strategies. Even when differences in age and gender between groups were controlled for, patients who had just undergone surgery following traffic accidents reported...

The present study used the homophone spelling task to investigate whether induced disgust facilitates an interpretational bias. In addition, it considered whether factors related to anxiety and disgust moderate this disgust-generated threat-interpretation bias. Participants were assigned to one of three groups in which they experienced a neutral, a...

This paper reports the results of three studies using mood induction procedures (MIPs) designed to investigate the relationship between anxiety and disgust. Study 1 used guided imagery vignettes (i.e., asking participants to imagine themselves in a series of described situations) and music (Mayer, Allen, & Beauregard, 1995). Study 2 used video clip...

This article describes a test of mood-as-input theory predictions as applied to a rumination task in a nonclinical population. An experimenter-controlled interview was used to allow participants to reflect on a personal period of depression while in an experimentally-induced mood state (either negative or positive) or while deploying a specific sto...

The present paper reports the results of a study investigating the relationship between a domains‐independent measure of disgust (the Disgust Propensity and Sensitivity Scale‐Revised) and measures of eating disorder symptomatology in a non‐clinical population. Significant correlations between disgust sensitivity and disgust propensity and selected...

The present study was designed to test the possibility that disgust may facilitate anxious psychopathology by facilitating levels of anxiety sensitivity. Using an experimental design, four groups of participants experienced inductions of disgust, anxiety happiness or neutral mood, and analogue measures representative of beliefs related to anxiety s...

In this chapter we describe evidence for the involvement of the disgust emotion in animal fears and phobias. If the disgust emotion is central to an understanding of the acquisition and experience of animal fears and phobias, then a number of important issues remain to be explored. We first describe in detail the evidence for an association between...

This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating the effect of induced anger on interpretational bias using the homophone spelling task. Four groups of participants experienced anger, anxiety, happy or neutral mood inductions and then completed the homophone spelling task. Participants who experienced anger and anxiety inductions repor...

Although research into evaluative conditioning (EC) has progressed considerably over the past 30 years, there have been some doubts about the strength and reliability of conditioning effects – especially when visual stimuli are used. Partly this has been due to well-documented methodological debates and empirical evidence of alternative causes of a...

Measuring Pathological WorryThe Catastrophising Process: Some Initial FindingsThe Catastrophising Interview as a Research ToolUses of the Catastrophising Interview Technique in Clinical SettingsSummaryAcknowledgementsReferences

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Anxiety-based disorders are among the most common mental health problems experienced in the population today. Worry is a prominent feature of most anxiety-based disorders including generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Written by international experts, Worr...

This study investigated the effect of an experimental disgust induction and experience of a homophone spelling task on subsequent anxiety to fear-relevant, disgust-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli in a non-clinical population. The design of the study allowed an assessment of (1) whether disgust facilitates anxiety only if the stimulus being eva...

This paper reports the results of two experiments designed to test predictions from the mood-as-input hypothesis about the factors that contribute to the ending of a worry bout. Experiment 1 looked at changes in self-reported mood across a catastrophising interview task. Experiment 2 investigated whether there were any changes in stop rule deployme...

This contribution discusses the nature of specific phobias, describes the range of stimuli that commonly act as phobic stimuli, and then continues by discussing theories of the aetiology of phobias and the most common forms of treatment. Traditional theories of phobias have alluded to learning through classical conditioning or the biological pre-wi...

This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating the effect of induced disgust on interpretational bias using the homophone spelling task. Four groups of participants experienced a disgust, anxiety, happy or neutral mood induction and then completed the homophone spelling task which requires the participant to interpret ambiguous words...

This paper describes a study designed to investigate the efficacy of two traditional classical conditioning procedures in generating evaluative conditioning (EC) in the picture-picture paradigm in human participants. Differential EC was found using both simultaneous and trace conditioning procedures. In addition, the use of a block-subblock (BSB) n...

The present paper describes the results of a study investigating the relationship between measures of disgust and measures of hypochondriasis and health anxiety. The results indicated that (1) there were highly significant correlations between measures of trait disgust and disgust sensitivity and measures of hypochondriasis and health anxiety, (2)...

Studies concentrating on interindividual differences in experiencing disgust have indicated that disgust propensity is associated with certain disorders, such as fear of blood and fear of spiders (de Jong & Merckelbach, 1998). However, current indices of disgust propensity suffer from conceptual overlap with other measures of psychopathology.Moreov...

In two broad sections, this chapter describes how our knowledge of the cognitive factors involved in human fear and anxiety has developed over recent years. The first section describes the nature of the information-processing systems involved in processing threat and how these systems are affected by fear-related states such as anxiety. The second...

Two studies are reported that investigated the processes involved in stopping worry. Study 1 found that the use of as many as can stop rules was significantly related to measures of trait worry and beliefs about the positive and negative consequences of worrying, and Study 2 demonstrated that the reported use of as many as can stop rules significan...

This article reports the results of 2 experiments designed to test predictions from the mood-as-input hypothesis on the role of inflated responsibility in perseverative checking. Through the use of an analog checking task in both experiments, the authors showed that perseveration, as indicated by a range of measures relevant to compulsive checking,...

The present paper reports the results of two experiments designed to test predictions from the mood-as-input account of perseverative checking. Using an analogue checking task, both experiments showed that perseveration, as indicted by a range of measures relevant to compulsive checking, was affected by the configuration of the stop rule for the ta...

This study aimed to explore cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between pathological worry and fatigue in a working population. In employees with very low or very high fatigue levels, psychometrics of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ; measuring pathological worry) and the Checklist Individual Strength (CIS; measuring fatigue) were...

Almost everyone will claim to have a phobia of some kind. Often these fears are common, such as a fear of spiders. They can sometimes be debilitating and make daily life difficult, such as a fear of riding in a car; or they can just seem unusual or strange, such as a fear of cotton wool or buttons. Phobias are normally defined as an unreasonable fe...

The present paper reports the results of two studies that used a hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis to categorise the emotional profiles of disgust‐evoking stimuli. Study 1 revealed three clusters of stimuli corresponding to: (1) nondisgust or “disgust‐irrelevant” items, (2) “primary” disgust items containing a range of disgust‐relevant it...

This study tests two alternative hypotheses about how phobic information is processed in spider fearful and nonfearful individuals: (1) the threat-related cognitive set hypothesis and (2) the dimensions hypothesis. Counter to the traditional cognitive model of fear, the dimensions hypothesis predicts that spider fearful individuals tend to prioriti...

There is now considerable evidence that phobic responding is associated with a bias towards expecting aversive or traumatic outcomes following encounters with the phobic stimulus (e.g. Behavioural Brain Sci. 18 (1995) 289-325; Phobias: A Handbook of Theory, Research and Treatment. Wiley, Chichester, 1997). In terms of conditioning contingencies, th...

This paper describes two experiments designed to investigate how a current model of task perseveration, the mood-as-input hypothesis, might be applied to activities relevant to compulsive checking. The mood-as-input hypothesis predicts that perseveration at an open-ended task will be determined by a combination of the "stop rules" adopted for the t...

The present paper reports the results of two experiments designed to test some predictions from a mood-as-input explanation of catastrophic worrying (). In particular, these experiments attempted to identify whether worriers possess characteristics that would contribute to the use of relatively strict 'as many as can' closure rules for catastrophis...

The present paper reports the results of two experiments exploring possible changes in the affective ratings of foodstuffs as a result of their pairing with pictures of differing types of female body shapes. Experiment 1 reports the results of a visual evaluative conditioning (EC) experiment in which pictures of foodstuffs (CSs) were paired with pi...