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Thirty volunteers who met criteria for generalized anxiety disorder received 12 sessions of training in progressive muscular relaxation. Sixteen of the clients also were given cognitive therapy during 10 of those sessions, and the remaining 14 received nondirective therapy. Therapy was provided by 16 graduate student clinicians. The group as a whole showed substantial reductions in anxiety as measured by psychiatric assessor ratings, questionnaires, and daily self-monitoring, although relaxation plus cognitive therapy produced significantly greater improvement than relaxation plus nondirective therapy on several pretherapy-posttherapy questionnaires. Relaxation-induced anxiety, as measured by a questionnaire after each relaxation session, was significantly related to improvement in the total group: Oients who became anxious during relaxation training showed the least improvement.Behavior therapy techniques have shown considerable success with several of the anxiety disorders. Controlled trials have demonstrated the efficacy of exposure-based methods in treating simple phobia, agoraphobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder and have demonstrated their general superiority over cognitive therapy (Foa & Kozak, 1985). Generalized anxiety has responded less successfully to this treatment. Because generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by an apparent lack of external anxiety cues, exposure methods become more difficult in practice and the conditioning theory upon which they are based seems less relevant as an explanatory model. Thus, behavioral researchers have focused their attention on the possible role of internal (both cognitive and somatic) fear cues in understanding the process of the disorder (e.g., Barlow, 1985). Logical, therapeutic applications from this point of view have included relaxation and cognitive therapy in which new, somatically oriented or cognitively oriented coping strategies are learned in response to internal anxiety cues. Considerable re-

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Clients in treatment for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) were compared to a control group to assess the extent and nature of imagery during worry or while thinking about a personally relevant positive future event. Two methods were used to assess mentation and were completed in counter balanced order within the worry and positive conditions. One method assessed the occurrence of imagery by requiring participants to categorize their mentation as verbal thoughts or images every 10 s. The other method involved participants estimating the duration of any imagery that occurred in the previous 10 s. Imagery during worry occurred less often than while thinking about a positive event for both groups, but GAD clients had a more pronounced deficit of imagery during worry than the control group. Images that occurred were briefer during worry than while thinking about a positive future event and were briefer in the GAD than the control group for both worry and positive conditions. The results thus confirmed that imagery is less common during worry in clients with GAD but also demonstrated that the imagery that does occur in GAD is briefer.