The Amelioration of Anxiety Sensitivity by Cognitive Defusion Techniques: A Focus on the Fear of Respiratory Symptoms

Abstract

Anxiety sensitivity (AS) refers to the tendency to fear of anxiety-related sensations. Catastrophic interpretation of bodily sensation is the major characteristic of AS. Cognitive Defusion (CD), the key process of acceptance and commitment therapy, is to prevent suffering from one's own thoughts (i.e., Cognitive Fusion) and aims to make people aware that a thought is just a thought and a feeling is just a feeling. To investigate CD's effects on AS, this study focused on fear of respiratory symptoms (FRS), one of the sub-components of AS, and examined whether FRS can be conceptualized as Cognitive Fusion (CF) and whether CD can ameliorate FRS. Female college students who scored in the top 75 percentile or the bottom 25 percentile in their FRS scores were invited (28 people for each group) to participate in the experiment among 329 preliminary survey respondents. Two groups (high FRS and low FRS) showed significant differences in all scales related with CF. Afterwards, half of both groups were given CD intervention while the remaining were allotted into a control condition. After intervention, the changes of FRS and other measures measuring CF were analyzed. Results showed that CD decreased FRS and believability of a negative thought during a breath-holding task only in high FRS group, but increased willingness and breath-holding duration for both high and low FRS groups. In this regard, the present study suggests that even a short intervention, such as CD focusing on disconnecting a catastrophic thought process, can ameliorate AS.