Cognitive-Affective control training reduces worry and GAD symptoms: investigating training and transfer effect

Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), have been considered as an index of cognitive control deficiency. The aim of this study was to investigate whether enhancing cognitive control over emotional stimuli can decrease worry intrusions and severity of GAD symptoms. Based on the results of structured clinical interview for the DSM-5 (SCID), 45 students of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) were who had GAD, chosen to participate in this study. Then they were assigned equally and randomly to three conditions of intervention, control and active cotrol groups; then they completed PSWQ, GAD-7, emotional stroop task and Go/No Go task as pre-test. The intervention group received 16 sessions of cognitive-affective control training using emotional stroop with trial-based feedback, also the active control group received the same amount of training sessions of emotional stroop with no feedback, and finally the control group was on a waiting list. After post-test assessments, results of ANCOVA showed that training sessions was effective on stroop performance, reduction in worry intrusions and GAD symptoms, while training in cognitive inhibition did not transfer to behavioral inhibition. Findings revealed that not only cognitive control plays a major role in worry and GAD symptoms, but also cognitive control training might be a promising path to decrease the severity of anxiety disorders. Training with emotional stimuli can enhance performance and using trial-based feedback can pave the way to get better clinical results