Although individual differences exist in how people respond to positive affect (PA), little research addresses PA regulation in people with anxiety disorders. The goal of this study was to provide information about responses to PA in people with symptoms of social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The tendency to dampen PA and the ability to savor PA were examined in an undergraduate sample. Analyses examined the unique links between these reactions and symptoms of anxiety disorders, controlling for a history of depression. Given the high comorbidity of depression and anxiety, exploratory analyses further controlled for generalized anxiety disorder. Results demonstrated that one or both measures of affect regulation made a unique and substantial contribution to predicting each anxiety disorder except agoraphobia, above and beyond prediction afforded by symptoms of depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Clinical implications and areas for future research are discussed.
Robust individual differences exist in how people respond to positive affect (PA). Many people use strategies to enhance and sustain positive affective states; these include thinking about positive self-qualities, reflecting on how good life is, or focusing on the experience that triggered the PA. Somewhat counterintuively, though, it has also become clear that some people react in ways that are likely to dampen PA (Feldman, Joormann, & Johnson, 2008). An example of a dampening response to PA would be to reflect that “This will never last.” Responses that sustain and amplify PA are related to higher self-esteem and confidence (Larsen & Prizmic, 2004; Martin & Tesser, 1996), whereas those that diminish PA are tied to lower self-esteem (Feldman et al., 2008). It has been suggested that people with low self-esteem may try to diminish their positive feelings because they do not believe they deserve to experience PA (Parrott, 1993; Wood, Heimpel, & Michela, 2003).
Dampening responses to PA may also be related to psychopathologies (Clark & Watson, 1991). The syndrome that has received the most attention in this regard is depression, which is known to be characterized by low levels of PA. People with depression report that they avoid PA, engage in less cognitive elaboration of positive mood states, savor their positive experiences less, and are more likely to dampen their positive moods, compared to persons who are less depressed (Bryant, 2003; Feldman et al., 2008; Min’er & Dejun, 2001). Thus, depression seems to be linked to reactions that dampen PA that naturally arises.
Less is known about how people with anxiety disorders respond to PA. However, indirect evidence suggests that a similar tendency may be at work in at least some anxiety disorders. For example, it is known that PA is low among people with social anxiety disorder, above and beyond what can be attributed to co-occurring depression (Brown, Chorpita, & Barlow, 1998; Kashdan, 2002, Kashdan, 2004 and Kashdan, 2007). When people with social anxiety have opportunities to pursue activities that could generate PA, they seem not to exploit those opportunities, but instead are preoccupied by attempts to conceal or suppress their socially anxious feelings (Kashdan & Steger, 2006). Thus, the positive feelings fail to emerge. Also consistent with dampening of PA, social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder have both been linked to elevated fear of positive emotions and lower expression of positive emotions, compared to persons without these disorders (Roemer, Salters, Raffa, & Orsillo, 2005; Turk, Heimberg, Luterek, Mennin, & Fresco, 2005). Such responses to PA among persons with anxiety disorders do not appear to be explained by depression (Kashdan & Steger, 2006), suggesting that minimizing of PA may be an element in anxiety disorders even without comorbid depression.
These findings pertaining to anxiety suggest maladaptive responses to PA in social phobia and generalized anxiety disorder. Although other anxiety disorders are characterized by low levels of PA, little is known about how PA is regulated in these other anxiety disorders (Brown et al., 1998; Watson, Clark, & Carey, 1988). Thus, the goal of the study reported here was to provide information about responses to PA among people with symptoms of various kinds of anxiety disorders. Two measures of PA regulation were used: a measure designed to assess tendencies to amplify or to dampen PA and a measure designed to assess the ability to savor and sustain PA. Symptoms of social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder were assessed. A measure of lifetime depression was included to provide additional evidence on the relationship between PA regulation and depression and to test whether any associations that emerged for anxiety symptoms did not depend on symptoms of comorbid depression. Finally, given that generalized anxiety disorder is highly comorbid with both depression and other anxiety disorders and shares similarities in emotion dysregulation with depression (Mennin, Holaway, Fresco, & Heimberg, 2007; Watson, 2005), exploratory analyses of maladaptive responses to PA were conducted controlling for generalized anxiety to determine whether any relationship between other anxiety disorders and PA regulation measures was unique.
