The looming maladaptive style: Anxiety, danger, and schematic processing.

Abstract

The importance of cognitive styles as psychological antecedents of psychopathology has gained increasing acceptance over the past 2 decades. Although ample research has explored cognitive styles that confer vulnerability to depression, cognitive styles that confer vulnerability to anxiety have received considerably less attention. In the present investigation, we examined the looming maladaptive style (LMS) as a cognitive style that functions as a danger schema to produce specific vulnerability to anxiety, but not to depression. In 4 studies, we examined the psychometric properties of a revised measure of the LMS, its predictive utility, and its effects on threat-related schematic processing. Results provided evidence for the validity of the LMS and indicated that it predicts anxiety and schematic processing of threat over and above the effects of other cognitive appraisals of threat, even in individuals who are currently nonanxious.