Search results for "Anxiety."

Anxiety and Enjoyment in the Foreign Language Classroom

2019

Abstract To balance the research that has been carried out on negative emotions, the researchers in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) have recently focused on the role of positive academic emotions and their role in the process of acquiring a foreign language (FL). The aim of the present article is to examine the relationships between foreign language enjoyment (FLE), foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA) and students’ academic achievement in English in order to prove that these two emotions do not constitute opposite dimensions but may converge and diverge from time to time during the learning process. This article calls for a more dynamic approach to studying emotions and…

Cognitive Biases in Pathological Health Anxiety

2016

Pathological health anxiety refers to the medically unfounded fear of suffering from a severe illness. Differences in cognitive processes related to attention, memory, and evaluation of health threat have been hypothesized to underlie pathological health anxiety. In no study, however, have researchers systematically and simultaneously assessed different cognitive biases. On the basis of the idea that multiple cognitive biases simultaneously contribute to psychopathology (the combined-cognitive-bias hypothesis), we compared 88 patients with pathological health anxiety, 52 patients with depressive disorder, and 52 healthy participants on their performance in several cognitive tasks involving…

Factors associated with the anxious symptomatology in a sample of university students

2018

BACKGROUND: The university period may represent a moment in which the mental well-being of students is subjected to stress with relative predisposition to the development of diseases related to mood disorders. The aim of the study was to measure the severity of anxious symptoms within the student population of the University of Palermo. METHODS: An anonymous online questionnaire was provided to students enrolled in the mailing list of the Regional Agency for the Right to University Study of the University of Palermo. The first section investigated demographic and social data, while in the second section the B.A.I. (Beck Anxiety Inventory) test was administered. RESULTS: The sample consists …

Dimensions of Anxiety, Age, and Gender: Assessing Dimensionality and Measurement Invariance of the State-Trait for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety (STI…

2018

The State-Trait Inventory for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety (STICSA) is a widely used measure of state and trait anxiety that permits a specific assessment of cognitive and somatic anxiety. Previous research provided inconsistent findings about its factor structure in non-clinical samples (e.g., hierarchical or bi-factor structure). To date, no psychometric validation of the Italian version of the STICSA has been conducted. Our study aimed to determine the psychometric functioning of the Italian version of the STICSA, including its dimensionality, gender and age measurement equivalence, and convergent/divergent validity in a large sample of community-dwelling participants (N = 2,938; 55.9% …

Don't Think That Kids Aren't Noticing: Indirect Pathways to Children's Fear of COVID-19

2021

The present study is couched within Rachman's three-pathway theory of fear acquisition (Rachman, 1977, 1991). Besides the direct contact with the objects of fear, this model also includes two indirect pathways to fear acquisition: negative information transmission and modeling. The study aims to explore the contribution of these three factors to the level of children's fear of COVID-19. The sample consisted of 376 children (59.6% girls), aged 7–19 (Mage = 12.77, SDage = 3.57), and one of their parents (Mage = 42.88, SDage = 6.00). The survey was conducted online during the COVID-19 national state of emergency in the Republic of Serbia. The children assessed their fear of COVID-19, general f…

Psychometric Properties of the Spanish Version of the Nonattachment Scale (NAS) and Its Relationship with Mindfulness, Decentering, and Mental Health

2016

Abstract Nonattachment is a Buddhism-rooted construct, which can be defined as the relative absence of fixation on ideas, images, or sensory objects, as well as an absence of internal pressure to get, hold, avoid, or change circumstances or experiences. The present study was aimed at exploring the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Nonattachment Scale (NAS) and at delimitating the relationship between the NAS and measures of mindfulness, decentering, and negative emotional symptoms. Pooling the NAS data from Spanish meditators (n = 335) and nonmeditators (n = 270), we performed an exploratory factor analysis and then estimated the fit of two competing models (one-factor m…

Attachment Styles and Suicide-Related Behaviors in Adolescence: The Mediating Role of Self-Criticism and Dependency

2017

Insecure attachment and the personality dimensions of self-criticism and dependency have been proposed as risk factors for suicide in adolescents. The present study examines whether self-criticism and dependency mediate the relationship between insecure attachment styles and suicidality. A sample of 340 high-school students (73.2% females), ranging in age from 13 to 20 years (M = 16.47, SD = 1.52), completed the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire for Adolescents, the Depressive Experiences Questionnaire for Adolescents, the Attachment Style Questionnaire, and the Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised. The results partially support the expected mediation effects. Self-criticism, but not…

Access to autobiographical memory as an emotion regulation strategy and its relation to dispositional mindfulness

2016

Mindfulness research has extensively focused on mechanisms that make it work. Emotional regulation (ER) has been proposed as one of the mechanisms to explain the effects of mindfulness on health. ER is composed of a broad set of strategies, such as the use of autobiographical memory (AM), which refers to the recollection of personally experienced past events to regulate the emotion (i.e., remembering a positive past event in order to calm anxiety). Authors suggest that mindfulness and AM are related. However, few studies exist to explore this relationship that could promote a more adaptive ER. The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between the mindfulness trait and the use of …

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Self Compassion (SC) Training for Parents of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Pilot Trial in …

2021

This study aims to develop a clinical trial to test the efficacy of a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and self-compassion (SC) program on self-reported values of anxiety, depression, and stress in parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in primary school, in order to assess their integration into the framework of community intervention programs in Spain. Methods: A brief 8-week training program using mindfulness-based intervention (MBSR) and self-compassion (SC) has been applied to twelve Valencian ASD parents, ten of whom completed the program. Participants were assigned to two groups

2018

Experiential avoidance, cognitive defusion, and mindfulness have all been associated with psychological disorders and well-being. This study investigates whether they predict psychological distress, i.e., symptoms of burnout, depression, stress and anxiety, in parents of children with chronic conditions. We hypothesized that these factors would exhibit a large degree of common variance, and that when compared to mindfulness and defusion, experiential avoidance on its own would predict a larger proportion of unique variance. 75 parents of children with chronic conditions having burnout symptoms who participated in an intervention study completed measures of burnout, stress, anxiety, depressi…