Introduction to anxiety sensitivity: recent findings and new directions.

There has been a long-standing recognition that cognitive factors may play a formative role in anxiety and its disorders (Barlow, 2002). Since the 1980s, there has been great progress made in understanding the nature of cognitive risk for anxiety psychopathology. Within this context, numerous cognitive factors have been implicated and studied as potential risk factors for various anxiety conditions. Perhaps one of the most well-known and promising of these has been anxiety sensitivity (AS; Reiss & McNally,1985). AS is the fear of anxiety-related bodily sensations, which arise from beliefs that the sensations have harmful personal consequences (McNally,2002). To illustrate, people high in AS may be frightened of harmless heart palpitations because they believe the sensations will lead to cardiac arrest,whereas people low in AS do not fear these sensations because they believe them to be harmless. High AS is theorized to enhance anxious and fearful responding to internal cues through associative learning and/or cognitive misinterpretation (McNally, 2002). Numerous studies have indicated that AS is, in fact, related to increased risk of panic attacks (e.g., Hayward, Killen, Kraemer, & Taylor, 2000; Schmidt, Lerew, & Jackson, 1997, 1999) and anxiety disorders (Schmidt, Zvolensky, & Maner, 2006). Although the vast majority of work on AS has been conducted in relation to panic psychopathology (Zvolensky, Schmidt, Bernstein, & Keough, 2006), researchers