Abstract

The Cognitive Model of Panic Attacks (the CMP) proposes that panic attack results from the catastrophic misinterpretations of bodily sensations, which may on many occasions be so fast that patients may not be aware of them. In the present study, 2 experiments were conducted to evaluate the predictions derived from the hypothesis of automatic catastrophic misinterpretations of bodily sensations. Using a word report task in which both bodily sensation and non-bodily sensation words were presented at 70-85% accuracy threshold, Experiment I explored the perceptual sensitivity to bodily sensations in panics. Panics were more accurate in reporting bodily sensation words than were normals. Using a contextual priming task in which subjects should read the remaining part of each sentence as quikly as possible after looking at the early part, Experiment II tested one of the basic assumptions of the CMP. Panics showed a greater priming effect in reading catastrophic words in a sentence than did the normal subjects. This result supports the notion that catastrophic misinterpretations are automatic, probably due to strong associations between bodily sensations and catastrophic cognitions. These two experiments showed that bodily sensation informations are more quickly labeled by panics than other informations, and that such interpretations are catastrophic in nature. These two characteristics can be regarded as cognitive sets for panic attacks. All these results are consistant with the assumptions of the CMP.