THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EXERCISE AND ANXIETY SENSITIVITY AND THE ROLE OF RUNNING AS INTEROCEPTIVE EXPOSURE IN A BRIEF COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL TREATMENT FOR DECREASING ANXIETY SENSITIVITY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Anxiety sensitivity (AS; fear of anxiety-related bodily sensations) is a risk factor for anxiety and related psychological disorders. Preliminary evidence also associates high AS with reduced levels of physical exercise and fitness. The primary objectives of the five studies comprising this dissertation were 1) to further explore the relationships between AS levels and exercise/fitness levels, and 2) to evaluate outcomes and processes of a brief group cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) that included a novel exercise-based interoceptive exposure (IE; exposure to feared anxiety-related sensations) component of running, with female undergraduate students. High AS female undergraduate participants endorsed more barriers to exercise than low AS participants, and these accounted for the inverse relationships between AS group and exercise/fitness levels (Study 1). The brief CBT/IE led to decreases in AS levels (Studies 2 and 4) and in symptoms of stress, depression, and anxiety (Study 4) for high AS participants. Processes involved in the brief CBT’s therapeutic effects were explored by examining cognitive (i.e., catastrophic thoughts), affective (i.e., feelings of anxiety), and somatic (i.e., physical sensations) reactions to the running IE component with an existing measure, the hyperventilation questionnaire (HVQ; Study 2), and a brief version of the measure, the HVQ-B, developed and validated in Study 3 (Study 5). Changes in cognitive and affective reactions to running were most closely associated with the brief CBT/IE’s therapeutic benefits, underlying the importance of changing the meaning of and emotional reaction to physiological arousal. Surprisingly, a health education control (HEC) intervention consisting of an interactive discussion on exercise, nutrition and sleep for health, including problem-solving barriers to health behaviours, also led to decreases in AS levels and in symptoms of depression and anxiety (Study 4). Physical exercise, the common link between the two interventions, may be partially driving the interventions’ therapeutic benefits. More specifically, perhaps both interventions addressed barriers to exercise, either by altering the meaning of and emotional reaction to exercise (CBT/IE), or through problem-solving (HEC). Encouraging physical exercise in high AS individuals by acknowledging and addressing barriers to exercise might help decrease these individuals’ AS levels and improve their overall mental health
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".