RISKIND ET AL.Looming Cognitive Style THE LOOMING COGNITIVE STYLE: A COGNITIVE VULNERABILITY FOR ANXIETY DISORDERS

The model of looming vulnerability identifies a cognitive vulnerability factor for anxiety disorders. The looming cognitive style is hypothesized as an overarching cognitive vulnerability to anxiety disorders but is not applicable to depression. The looming cognitive style refers to a tendency to generate, maintain, and attend to in-ternally generated scenarios of increasing danger and rapidly rising risk. Other models of threat appraisal may offer a relatively lifeless distillation of the anxious individual’s phenomenological experience. The subjective sense of looming vul-nerability is proposed to elicit anxiety, sensitize the individual to signs of move-ment and threat, bias cognitive processing, and impede habituation to threat stimuli (Riskind, 1997a). It also discriminates anxiety and focal fears from depression. The looming model is presented and relevant empirical evidence is reviewed. Considerable research has demonstrated cognitive vulnerability factors for depression and suggested these factors do not strongly apply to anx-iety. More to the point of the present article, there may also be a cognitive vulnerability to anxiety that is not applicable to depression. Our re-search program uniquely identifies a cognitive vulnerability factor for a spectrum of anxiety disorders but not for depression. Our research stands in contrast to most work on anxiety that has focused on nonspe