New instrument to determine anxiety level

A new instrument developed by a Washington and Lee University psychologist is designed to help clinicians determine more objectively a patient's level of anxiety.

Dan Johnson, assistant professor of psychology at W&L, has created the Attention Control Capacity for Emotion (ACCE) task, which will be tested in a clinical setting at Manchester University in England in the coming year.

"Psychologists are heavily reliant on self-reporting to diagnose a patient's level of anxiety," said Johnson "This is a big problem. Although self-reporting is important, patients can distort, exaggerate or minimize their condition. And there is no way to tell if they are doing this. The ACCE task can also be used to track the effectiveness of therapies."

For the past five years, Johnson has tested almost 400 participants from the general population across four studies in creating the ACCE task. He continued his research this summer with the help of two Washington and Lee undergraduates who were participating in the University's R. E. Lee Scholars program: Kathleen Blackburn, a senior psychology and romance languages major, and Grace Cushman, a junior psychology major. The students recruited and supervised all the participants in the research, collected the data and then presented the results to fellow R.E. Lee Scholars and advising faculty.

In the first phase of the research this summer, 80 students recruited from W&L and neighboring Virginia Military Institute looked at a series of images on a computer. The images in question were either depicting emotional facial expressions (an angry face, for instance) or neutral shapes.

The students were first asked to focus on then emotional expressions and were then told to switch their attention between those images and the neutral shapes. Their reaction time was based on how quickly the subjects clicked a mouse button to indicate that their attention had shifted from the first image to the second. Johnson can use a comparison of these reaction times to help determine an individual's current level of anxiety or depression.

"At this point I'm using the normal population to develop this instrument," said Johnson. "There is tremendous variation in peoples' ability to keep their emotions in check, and this instrument can help us capture people who are effective at doing so and those who aren't so effective."

Johnson reported earlier findings in an article in the December 2009 edition of the journal Cognition and Emotion. That article, "Attentional control capacity of emotion: An individual-difference measure of internal controlled attention," was based on research Johnson conducted at the University of Oklahoma prior to joining the W&L faculty in 2009.

Johnson said that the current phase of his research is linking the ACCE test to something we do on a daily basis - e.g., switch our focus of attention between emotionally-laden thoughts (e.g., my boss in unhappy with me) and emotionally-neutral thoughts (e.g., I need to get an oil change). This phase in its early stages, but he hopes it will more precisely reveal what the ACCE task is capturing.