The effect of disgust on anxiety ratings to fear-relevant, disgust-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli.

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 evaluated is disgust-relevant and (2) whether experiencing the threat-interpretation bias induced by disgust facilitates anxiety generally. The results indicated that a disgust induction facilitated levels of self-reported anxiety to a range of scenarios regardless of whether they were disgust-relevant, fear-relevant or fear-irrelevant, and regardless of whether participants had experienced the disgust-induced threat-interpretation bias. This study provides evidence for a general effect of disgust on self-reported anxiety to stimuli regardless of the disgust-relevance or fear-relevance of those stimuli. The results lend support to the view that disgust has a causal effect on anxiety, and implicates disgust as a risk factor for anxious psychopathology.

What ends a worry bout? An analysis of changes in mood and stop rule use across the catastrophising interview task.

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 deployment between the beginning and end of a catastrophising interview task. Experiment 1 demonstrated that worriers tended to show increases in negative mood and decreases in positive mood over the course of catastrophising. In Experiment 2, participants exhibited a significant shift away from endorsing the use of 'as many as can' stop rules and a significant increasing tendency to endorse the use of 'feel like continuing' stop rules over the course of catastrophising. These results suggest that worriers exhibit increases in negative mood across the worry bout, but shift from the use of 'as many as can' to 'feel like continuing' stop rules. Mood-as-input hypothesis predicts that if high worriers ask the question "do I feel like continuing?" in the context of increasing negative mood, this will imply that the activity is no longer enjoyable or profitable and should be terminated. The results are discussed in the context of mood-as-input accounts of pathological worrying and the therapeutic implications of these findings are reviewed.

Experienced disgust causes a negative interpretation bias: a causal role for disgust in anxious psychopathology.

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 presented through headphones. Both the disgust and anxiety groups interpreted significantly more threat/neutral homophones as threat than both the happy and neutral groups; the disgust group also interpreted significantly fewer positive/neutral homophones as positive than the happy group. These findings are consistent with the view that induced disgust causes a negative interpretational bias which is similar to that reported for anxiety. The results could not be interpreted in terms of the disgust induction concurrently raising levels of self-reported anxiety, but could be interpreted in terms of disgust maintaining existing levels of anxiety. The effect of disgust was to facilitate negative interpretations rather than emotional interpretations regardless of valence. These findings provide the basis for a causal role for disgust in anxious psychopathology. Because the effect is a non-specific emotion-congruent one, elevated disgust levels will result in a predisposition to interpret information in a threatening way across a broad range of anxious- and threat-relevant domains.