Linking Thoughts and Feelings: Age differences in response to intrusive thoughts

Thank you again for your interest in the study on treatment for panic attacks. It greatly helped us in our research to try and understand the relationship between how people process information and changes in panic symptoms over the course of cognitive behavior therapy for panic disorder.

In one paper following from this study, we examined how individuals with panic disorder process potentially threatening information compared to individuals without panic disorder. We looked at three areas: I) automatic associations in memory that reflect a panic self-concept, II) interpretation of ambiguous events that can be seen as relevant to panic, and III) attention to words that were panic-relevant.

For more information about information processing biases in panic disorder, see the following article:

• Teachman, B. A., Smith-Janik, S. B., & Saporito, J. (2007). Information processing biases and panic disorder: Relationships among cognitive and symptom measures. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 45 , 1791-1811.

Additionally, we have evaluated how rapidly people experience symptom reduction over the course of cognitive behavior therapy for panic disorder, finding that individuals who experience large sudden gains in treatment (versus those who experience their gains more gradually) often do particularly well in therapy overall.

Further, we have examined how changes in automatic panic associations over the course of therapy predict changes in symptom reduction, finding that a decline in the tendency to automatically associate the self with panic predicts subsequent decline in symptoms.

Thank you for seeking more information about the Linking Thoughts and Feelings study. We are interested in investigating age differences in “unwanted thoughts,” which are thoughts and images that pop into mind unexpectedly and are often experienced as strange or unusual. Occasionally people find they can rid their mind of unwanted thoughts fairly easily, but usually this is a very difficult thing to do. The purpose of the present study is to examine how younger and older adults feel after they are told that being unable to rid their mind of unwanted thoughts (known as difficulties with “thought suppression”) has particular meanings that are relevant to their age group.

For more information about thought suppression and unwanted thoughts, please read the following article:

• Purdon, C. & Clark, D.A. (2001). Suppression of obsession-like thoughts in non-clinical individuals: impact on thought frequency, appraisal, and mood state. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39, 1163-1181.

For more information about the relation of aging to emotional experience, please consult the following article:

• Carstensen, L.L. & Mikels, J.A. (2005). At the intersection of emotion and cognition: Aging and the positivity effect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14, 117-121.