Prospective intolerance of uncertainty is associated with maladaptive temporal distribution of avoidance responses: An extension of Flores, López, Vervliet, and Cobos (2018).
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry 2020;
68:101527. [PMID:
31743800 DOI:
10.1016/j.jbtep.2019.101527]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/08/2019] [Revised: 10/10/2019] [Accepted: 11/06/2019] [Indexed: 11/22/2022]
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES
Excessive maladaptive avoidance has been claimed to be one of the mechanisms through which intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may play its causal role in the development and maintenance of several anxiety and compulsive disorders. Consistently, Flores et al. (2018) found that individuals with higher Prospective IU (P-IU), a specific IU subfactor, display excessive avoidance response repetitions in a free-operant discriminative task to avoid an aversive noise. In the present study we tested the hypothesis that P-IU not only predicts the amount of avoidance responses but also how well the temporal distribution of such responses fits the temporal distribution of threats.
METHODS
Further correlation and hierarchical regression analysis of Flores et al.'s (2018) data served to test this hypothesis. We evaluated two aspects of the temporal distribution of responses: a) for how long participants were performing the responses; b) the behavioral discrimination between threatening and safe time periods.
RESULTS
The results showed that scoring high in P-IU was positively associated with longer periods of time dedicated to avoiding and with worse behavioral discrimination between threatening and safe time periods. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that later addition of inhibitory intolerance of uncertainty and trait anxiety did not significantly improved the explained variance.
LIMITATIONS
Our results are exclusively based on the use of a low-cost avoidance response, and the present study does not clarify the precise mechanisms that lead high P-IU people to engage in non-optimal avoidance response distribution through time.
CONCLUSIONS
These results suggest that excessive avoidance is also driven by uncertainty of threat timing and highlight the relevance of P-IU as a vulnerability factor for excessive and outspread avoidance behaviors.
Collapse