Nova Southeastern University

Anxiety Research

Research Focus

1) What is responsible for change in the therapeutic process? The first area of our research is the mediators and moderators of therapeutic outcome. We are interested in what affects the therapeutic outcome. Specifically, we are investigating how treatment alliance, therapist and client expectancies, homework compliance, and altruistic activities dynamically change with symptom reduction. That is, we are asking what enhances (or slows down) symptom reduction. We attempt to investigate this question by modeling trajectories of change in these different variables.

2) Causes and cultural factors in anxiety. The second focus of our research is how problematic anxiety develops and how it is maintained. Specifically, we are investigating the epigenesis of anxiety in children. We are also looking at cultural effects on anxiety, specifically anxiety associated with ataque de nervios.

3) Information Processing in Anxiety Disorders. The third area is how information is processed in anxiety disorders. We use cognitive, social, and neuropsychological paradigms to study the anxiety process. For example, people with anxiety tend to have an attentional bias toward threatening cues (for someone with social anxiety his or her attention is drawn to judgmental faces). We are also using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to investigate how people with anxiety disorders make quick judgments on how to act in an anxiety provoking situations. Future research will also focus on how to train these informational processing biases as a way to reduce symptoms.

4) Anxiety and Peak Performance. . Recent research has indicated that perceptual processes may be affected by fatigue and anxiety. For example, people tend to actual perceive a hill being steeper when they are fatigued. Fear is also thought to affect visual perception. We are also interested in how anxiety affects peak performance. An example of this area of research is looking how anxiety affects athletes. We are specifically investigating how fear affects perception, affordances (decision making), and implicit associations (of confidence).

If you are interested in becoming a lab member, please contact Craig Marker (marker at nova.edu).

Please see our recent work at the 42nd Annual meeting of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies

If you are interested in becoming a lab member, please email me (marker at nova.edu)

If you are interested in Anxiety Treatment, please visit our website at http://anxietytreatmentclinic.com