Psychotherapeutic treatments for generalized anxiety disorder: cognitive and behavioral therapies, enhancement strategies, and emerging efforts.

INTRODUCTION: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is common and disabling. Different versions of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have been tested, but no treatment works for everyone. Therefore, researchers have attempted approaches to enhance CBT. AREAS COVERED: The current narrative review examines meta-analyses and individual trials of CBT-based treatments for GAD. We focus on CBT and its cognitive and behavioral components as well as efforts to enhance CBT and its dissemination and generalizability. Enhancement efforts included interpersonal and emotional processing therapy, mindfulness-based CBT, emotion regulation therapy, intolerance of uncertainty therapy, the unified protocol, metacognitive therapy, motivational interviewing, and contrast avoidance targeted treatment. Emerging strategies to enhance dissemination have focused on technologically based treatments. Attempts at generalizability have included examination of efficacy within diverse racial and ethnic groups. EXPERT OPINION: We conclude that CBT is efficacious, and a number of enhancement efforts have shown some promise in improving upon CBT in single trials. However, more research is needed, particularly efforts to determine which enhancements work best for which individuals and what are the mechanisms of change. Furthermore, few technological interventions have been compared to active treatments. Finally, much more attention needs to be paid to ethnic and racial diversity in randomized controlled trials.

The jigsaw puzzle of fraudulent health claims: Missing psychological pieces.

Fraudulent health claims have become an inescapable fixture of the contemporary information (or misinformation) landscape. MacFarlane, Hurlstone, and Ecker (2020) provided a five-fold framework for conceptualizing susceptibility to fraudulent health claims, and proposed potential remedies for each driver of these claims. We build on their analysis by arguing that a complete account of fraudulent health claim susceptibility additionally requires a thoroughgoing consideration of (a) individual differences in cognitive styles and personality traits, (b) innumeracy and statistical illiteracy, and (c) persuasive appeals involving logical fallacies and commonplaces. We further contend that dual processing models of cognition may help to synthesize a variety of psychological variables relevant to fraudulent health claim vulnerability. In conjunction with our commentary, MacFarlane's framework underscores the broader point that complex, multifactorial psychological phenomena demand complex, multifactorial psychological explanations and solutions.