Cognitive Control in Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Investigation of Proactive and Reactive Inhibition

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is one of the most common mental disorders, which its core features represent basic elements of a wide variety of psychopathology categories. GAD has unknown aspects and neurocognitive accounts consider deficits in cognitive control as a basis for etiology and maintenance of this disorder. Cognitive control consists of three components; shifting, updating, and inhibition. The present study investigated inhibition as a facet of cognitive control in people with GAD.

Using the voluntary sampling method, 80 students of the Ferdowsi University of Mashhad participated in this retrospective study. Via announcement on the campus of the university, normal students and those who had GAD symptoms contacted researchers. Based on the scores of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and structured diagnostic interview, participants were divided into two groups; control and GAD. Finally, the stop-signal task (SST) was used to assess reactive and proactive inhibition.

There was a significant positive correlation between reactive and proactive inhibition. The GAD group had significantly higher performance than the normal group in reactive and proactive inhibition. The GAD group also had more omission errors as well as fewer commission errors than the normal group.

Inhibitory control plays a major role in GAD and explains several behavioral problems in this population. Excessive inhibition in GAD might be linked to behaviors, like freezing, procrastination, and threat detection in anxiety. Therefore, focusing on deficits in cognitive control and inhibition plays a major role in neurocognitive interventions of this disorder.