Short-Term Efficacy of a Worry Postponement Intervention for Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Worry postponement (WP), in which a client is asked to postpone worry until a 30-minute “worry time,” is a common component of CBT for GAD; however, the efficacy of WP has never been tested in people with GAD. Further, the mechanisms of change of WP are not known; nor are its effects on cognitive processes and symptoms related to GAD. A better understanding of the efficacy and mechanisms of change of WP could help to optimize CBT for GAD. The goals of the present study were to examine, in a sample of people with GAD, the effects of WP on worry and GAD symptoms, and cognitive processes and symptoms related to GAD. The study also examined the effects of WP on two proposed mediators: stimulus control and metacognitive beliefs. Sixty-seven adults were randomized to one of three conditions: 2- week worry postponement intervention (WP), 2-week worry monitoring intervention (MON), or an assessment only control. Participants completed outcome measures before and after the 2- week intervention period and at a 2-week follow-up. In the WP and MON conditions, participants completed daily worry monitoring using a phone-based application. All participants showed a significant decrease in past-week worry over the course of the study, with no significant differences between the conditions. There were no significant changes in GAD symptoms across conditions. There was no evidence that WP had superior effects to control groups on cognitive processes or symptoms related to GAD. There was no evidence that stimulus control or metacognitive beliefs mediated the reduction in past week worry in WP. This is the first known study to examine the effects of WP in people with GAD. Whereas worry did decrease on some indices over the course of the study, there were no significant differences between WP and two control conditions. Further this study found no evidence that WP has specific effects on two processes that are thought to be mechanisms of action. The findings of this study demonstrate the need to establish the efficacy of the treatment components used in CBT.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".