Elevated trait anxiety: Obstacle to progress with female clients?

Abstract

Contemporary clinicians employ progress-monitoring (PM) systems to differentiate between clients who are improving and those failing to make progress in psychotherapy. Once failing clients are identified, however, PM systems typically provide little feedback about how to adjust the provided therapy. The next step in the development of PM systems is to identify constructs that influence client progress and methods to assess these markers. Through a reanalysis of a previous study of psychotherapy progress involving 383 session ratings for 81 outpatient clients, this study examined the effect of trait anxiety on the amount and rate of client change across early sessions. Findings indicated that women with high trait anxiety evidenced smaller effect sizes and less likelihood of improvement on a measure of negative affect. Findings have implications for identification of high-trait-anxiety clients who evidence less improvement as well as treatment strategies with such individuals. Public Significance StatementTherapists are increasing their use of measures that assess client progress. This study investigates whether a measure of worry, particularly in women, can detect slow progress.

Online and Offline Art Therapy Based Interventions in Pandemic Times

“…Trait anxiety by itself had a strong correlation with negative affect reduction, which was an unpredicted result. This finding related to trait anxiety was the opposite of what the literature shows about in-person therapy effectiveness studies (Min et al, 2012;Meier, 2019). In this paper, our research question is whether this outcome is due to the online aspect, or the art therapy-based format.…”

Trait Anxiety in Individuals on the Autism Spectrum: a Systematic Review

“…The under-representation of females (and lack of reporting of any participants with non-binary gender) in trait anxiety research limits our understanding of any gender differences that may be present in individuals on the autism spectrum. This is of concern, considering neurotypical research showing differences between males and females in the prevalence (Lago-Mendez et al, 2006;Muris et al, 2001), and impacts (Endler & Parker, 1990;Meier, 2019;Tan et al, 2011) of trait anxiety. Further research is warranted to explore whether gender-specific experiences of trait anxiety in autism exist and whether they reflect those described in neurotypical literature.…”