Cognitive bias in panic disorder: A process dissociation approach to automaticity

We applied a variant of Jacoby's (1991) process dissociation procedure to p arse the relative contributions of automatic and controlled processes to wo rd-stem completion performance involving threatening, positive, and neutral material in patients with panic disorder and healthy control participants. Contrary to prediction, processing of threatening (relative to nonthreaten ing) information in panic disorder was not disproportionately influenced by automatic processing. We found limited evidence, however, that panic patie nts exhibit a baseline bias for completing sterns relevant to threat relati ve to nonthreat stems, perhaps indicating a proneness to engage in self-gen erated priming of threat material.