This stimulating resource presents the Looming Vulnerability Model, a nuanced take on the cognitive-behavioral conceptualization of anxiety, worry, and other responses to real or imagined threat. The core feature of the model-the perception of growing, rapidly approaching threat-is traced to humans' evolutionary past, and this dysfunctional perception is described as it affects cognitive processing, executive functioning, emotions, physiology, and behavior. The LVM framework allows for more subtle understanding of mechanisms of and risk factors for the range of anxiety disorders as well as for more elusive subclinical forms of anxiety, worry, and fear. In addition, the authors ably demonstrate how the LVM can inform and refine cognitive-behavioral and other approaches to conceptualization, assessment, and treatment of these often disabling conditions. This important volume: * Introduces the Looming Vulnerability Model in its evolutionary, developmental, cognitive, and ecological contexts. * Unites diverse theoretical strands regarding anxiety, fear, and worry including work on wildlife behavior, experimental cognition and perception, neuroimaging, and emotion. * Defines the looming cognitive style as a core aspect of vulnerability. * Describes the measurement of the looming cognitive style, Looming Maladaptive Style Questionnaire, and measures of looming vulnerability for specific disorders. * Details diverse clinical applications of the LVM across the anxiety disorders. Spotlighting phenomena particularly relevant to current times, Looming Vulnerability, brings a wealth of important new ideas to researchers studying anxiety disorders and practitioners seeking more avenues for treating anxiety in their patients.

Emotional disorders such as anxiety, depression, and dysfunctional patterns of eating are clearly among the most devastating and prevalent confronting practitioners, and they have received much attention from researchers--in personality, social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, as well as in clinical psychology and psychiatry. A major recent focus has been cognitive vulnerability, which seems to set the stage for recurrences of symptoms and episodes. In the last five years there has been a rapid proliferation of studies.
In this book, leading experts present the first broad synthesis of what we have now learned about the nature, of cognitive factors that seem to play a crucial role in creating and maintaining vulnerability across the spectrum of emotional disorders. An introductory chapter considers theory and research design and methodology and constructs a general conceptual framework for understanding and studying the relationships between developmental and cognitive variables and later risk, and the difference between distal cognitive antecedents of disorders (e.g. depressive inferential styles, dysfunctional attitudes) and proximal ones (e.g. schema activation or inferences). Subsequent chapters are organized into three sections, on mood, anxiety, and eating disorders. Each section ends with an integrative overview chapter that offers both incisive commentary and insightful suggestions for further systematic research.
A rich resource for all those professionally concerned with these problems, "Cognitive Vulnerability to Emotional Disorders" advances both clinical science and clinical practice.

This stimulating resource presents the Looming Vulnerability Model, a nuanced take on the cognitive-behavioral conceptualization of anxiety, worry, and other responses to real or imagined threat. The core feature of the model-the perception of growing, rapidly approaching threat-is traced to humans' evolutionary past, and this dysfunctional perception is described as it affects cognitive processing, executive functioning, emotions, physiology, and behavior. The LVM framework allows for more subtle understanding of mechanisms of and risk factors for the range of anxiety disorders as well as for more elusive subclinical forms of anxiety, worry, and fear. In addition, the authors ably demonstrate how the LVM can inform and refine cognitive-behavioral and other approaches to conceptualization, assessment, and treatment of these often disabling conditions. This important volume: * Introduces the Looming Vulnerability Model in its evolutionary, developmental, cognitive, and ecological contexts. * Unites diverse theoretical strands regarding anxiety, fear, and worry including work on wildlife behavior, experimental cognition and perception, neuroimaging, and emotion. * Defines the looming cognitive style as a core aspect of vulnerability. * Describes the measurement of the looming cognitive style, Looming Maladaptive Style Questionnaire, and measures of looming vulnerability for specific disorders. * Details diverse clinical applications of the LVM across the anxiety disorders. Spotlighting phenomena particularly relevant to current times, Looming Vulnerability, brings a wealth of important new ideas to researchers studying anxiety disorders and practitioners seeking more avenues for treating anxiety in their patients.