Nightmares typically seem to be followed by awakening with feelings of suffocation and helplessness and expressions of fearful or threatening thoughts.
If attention too easily latches onto negative or threatening thoughts, or if it stays stuck on those thoughts for too long, this may contribute to anxious or depressive symptoms.
Such intrusions can be opposed to some extent by top-down attentional control, but once dominant, threatening thoughts in verbal form tend to pre-empt attentional control resources, making it more difficult to ignore worry-related thoughts.
Thus for example, while it is plausible that perceiving a higher risk of cancer could result in more anxiety, it is also possible that raised anxiety may result in more threatening thoughts (Bower, 1981), including an increased perception of the risk of cervical cancer.
Despite these similarities, we suggest that prior models have not recognized the critical role of emotional processing biases, which not only serve to bring threatening thoughts into awareness, but continue to operate on the content of worry itself, augmenting and maintaining the impact of worry.
Look them in the eye and imagine projecting a laser beam into their eyes, into their mind, then produce threatening thoughts and send them directly through the imaginary laser beam into their minds.
Hence the more threatening the thought content, or the more catastrophic the interpretation, the more likely it is to capture attention, promoting escalation of negative thoughts into a full-blown and protracted worry episode.
After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.
This sense of the future loss, when they might loose their home, was so strong and so threatening that the thought of it only emerged momentarily before it was consciously repressed.
