Abstract
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) involves excessive or unrealistic anxiety and worry over multiple life circumstances, with accompanying symptoms of autonomic hyperactivity, motor tension, and vigilance and scanning (DSM-III-R; American Psychiatric Association, 1987). From a cognitive-behavioral perspective, the disorder represents perhaps the most diffuse and complex cognitive/ affective state among the anxiety disorders (Barlow, 1988). To the person with GAD, the world and especially the future are seen as dangerous much of the time, and the individual feels that he or she does not have resources to cope. A vicious cycle of threat cue detection (Mathews, in press), a mixture of somatic activation and inhibition (Borkovec, Shadick, & Hopkins, in press), and worrisome thought activity (Borkovec & Inz, 1990) perpetuates habitual anxious responding.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Costello, E., Borkovec, T.D. (1992). Generalized Anxiety Disorder. In: Freeman, A., Dattilio, F.M. (eds) Comprehensive Casebook of Cognitive Therapy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9777-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9777-0_4
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