Much empirical evidence attests to a strong relationship between the panic-related disorders and alcoholism. Recent data suggest that anxiety sensitivity (fear of anxiety) may be one common underlying vailable contributing to the large degree of overlap between the panic-related disorders and alcoholism. In fact, some data indicate that the relationship between anxiety sensitivity and alcohol misuse may be particularly strong in women, a group which is generally underrepresented in the alcoholism etiology literature. Research described in this thesis was conducted with the aim of further elucidating the nature of the relationship between anxiety sensitivity and alcohol use/abuse in young adult women. The series of seven experiments included in this thesis demonstrated that: (1) high levels of anxiety sensitivity are characteristic of subjects meeting diagnostic criteria for panic disorder, an anxiety disorder frequently associated with alcohol abuse; (2) female university students demonstrate significantly higher average levels of anxiety sensitivity than male university students; (3) anxiety sensitivity is an important predictor of self-reported rates of alcohol consumption in university women; (4) high anxiety sensitive university students are both more likely to report drinking alcohol primarily to "cope" with negative emotional states, and less likely to report drinking alcohol primarily for social-affiliative motives, than are low anxiety sensitive university students; (5) high anxiety sensitive women display greater degrees of sober subjective-emotional arousal when anticipating aversive stimulation, greater degrees of sober electrodermal reactivity to the aversive stimulation, and greater sensitivity to the dampening effects of alcohol on these measures of reactivity, than low anxiety sensitive controls; (6) high anxiety sensitive women show a sober attentional bias favoring the processing of physically threatening information, which is dampened through th
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.41202 |
| Date | January 1993 |
| Creators | Stewart, Sherry Heather |
| Contributors | Pihl, Robert O. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001383436, proquestno: NN91668, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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