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Step-by-Step Treatment
Published in Melisa Robichaud, Naomi Koerner, Michel J. Dugas, Cognitive Behavioral Treatment for Generalized Anxiety Disorder, 2019
Melisa Robichaud, Naomi Koerner, Michel J. Dugas
The belief that worrying, in and of itself, can prevent negative outcomes. This category reflects the belief that the act of worrying can affect the outcome of events; specifically, the belief that one’s worries are directly responsible for the nonoccurrence of negative events or the occurrence of positive events. This type of belief is sometimes called thought-action fusion. For example, “I have always worried about my child being involved in a serious car accident; it has never happened, so my worrying must be working.” This type of thinking is, of course, logically flawed, as the nonoccurrence of an event could be attributed to any number of things. For example, an individual might believe that his plane didn’t crash because he worried about it beforehand. However, it is more likely due to the remoteness of the particular event (i.e., planes crash infrequently), the skill of the pilot, or the clear weather during the flight. Another problem with this type of belief is that it usually involves selective attention. For example, a client might report that when they worry about presentations at work beforehand, they do well. However, have they ever not worried about a presentation and done well regardless? Conversely, have they ever worried about a presentation and not done well? Individuals with this type of belief will often search out evidence that confirms their beliefs and ignore any disconfirmatory evidence.
Obsessive compulsive disorder
Published in MS Thambirajah, Case Studies in Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2018
Thought action fusion refers to the perception that thought is equivalent to action, i.e. the belief that thinking something is the same as doing it. For example, the obsessional thought ‘I will stab my mother’ is considered to be equivalent to actually hurting or killing the mother. In short, the person with such intrusive thoughts holds himself equally responsible for thinking as for acting.
Gender differences in eating disorder-related intrusive thoughts
Published in Eating Disorders, 2022
All continuous variables were assessed for normality using visual inspection of stem and leaf plots, along with direct hypothesis tests of the assumption. Although some variables exhibited skewed distributions (i.e., the Purging & Disordered Eating measure of EITI Part 1; the Thought-Action Fusion and Responsibility measure of EITI Part 2A; and both the Distraction and Thought-Suppression measures of EITI Part 2B), as evidenced by Kolmogorov–Smirnov test results with p < .05 and skewness and kurtosis ratios with their relative standard errors ranging from 2.15 to 3.66, the level of skew was not considered serious enough to warrant transformation, particularly given the sample size. All variables demonstrated homogeneity of variance according to Levene’s test. A small number of missing values (<5%) were identified and were replaced using pooled multiple imputation estimates. Outliers were addressed using a 90th percentile winsorisation technique.