Are you threatening me?: Exploration of generalised anxiety and social anxiety’s influence on responses to social and non-social threats.

Sammanfattning

Anxiety disorders are some of the most prevalent disorders in modern times and often seriously impact the daily lives of sufferers. Although there is an abundance of research investigating potential links between anxiety and threat response, there is a lack of study into the nuanced relationships between different anxiety types and threat types. In addition, there are considerable limitations to much of the methodology selected for use in previous research. This thesis first aims to explore how generalised anxiety and social anxiety levels impact threat responses towards social threats and non-social threats. The second aim is to test the effectiveness of video stimuli with an audio component to convey threat in psychological research. Multiple measures of threat response, including subjective ratings, electrodermal activity measures, and heart rate variability are tested. The analyses shows that social anxiety levels significantly predict threat response towards social threat, but not non-social threat, in the present sample. Generalised anxiety level’s influence on threat response remains unclear, but hints are provided of possible hypotheses for future study. The strengths and weaknesses of the new methodology employed are tested and discussed. This research is mainly exploratory and therefore should be used as a starting point for future research in this field, both from a theoretical and methodological perspective.