Cognitive avoidance in phobia

Investigated the stage in which the bias changed into avoidance and whether cognitive avoidance of threat is restricted to information that refers to the anxiety response as opposed to the threatening stimulus. Therefore, 37 spider phobics (mean age 31 yrs) and 34 controls (mean age 38 yrs) were administered a negative priming task and a free recall task, using threat words and neutral words, both divided into stimulus-related and response-related words. There was no indication of cognitive avoidance of the response-related threat words as assessed by the negative priming task. Recall findings indicated an incomplete memory bias in phobics, with a better recall of stimulus-related threat words instead of a worse recall of response-related threat words. This suggests a passive cognitive avoidance mechanism, which may still impede the processing of response-related information, crucial for the success of exposure therapy