Intrusive imagery in anxiety disorders in adolescents

Background: Mental imagery plays an important role in models of anxiety disorders in adults. This understanding rests on qualitative and quantitative studies. Qualitative studies of imagery in anxious adolescents have not been reported in the literature. Aims: To address this gap, we aimed to explore adolescents’ experiences of spontaneous imagery in the context of anxiety disorders. Method: We conducted one-to-one semi-structured interviews, with 13 adolescents aged 13–17 years with a DSM-5 anxiety disorder, regarding their experiences of spontaneous imagery. We analysed participants’ responses using thematic analysis. Results: We identified five superordinate themes relating to adolescents’ influences on images, distractions from images, controllability of images, emotional responses to imagery and contextual influences on imagery. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that spontaneous images are an important phenomenon in anxiety disorders in adolescents, associated with negative emotions during and after their occurrence. Contextual factors and adolescents’ own cognitive styles appear to influence adolescents’ experiences of images in anxiety disorders.

Intrusive imagery in adolescent anxiety disorders

Background: Mental imagery plays an important role in models of anxiety disorders in adults. This understanding rests on qualitative and quantitative studies. Qualitative studies of imagery in anxious adolescents have not been reported in the literature. Aims: To address this gap, we aimed to explore adolescents’ experiences of spontaneous imagery in the context of anxiety disorders.Method: We conducted one-to-one semi-structured interviews, with 13 adolescents aged 13-17 years with a DSM-5 anxiety disorder, regarding their experiences of spontaneous imagery. We analysed participants’ responses using thematic analysis.Results: We identified five super-ordinate themes relating to adolescents’ influences on images, distractions from images, controllability of images, emotional responses to imagery and contextual influences on imagery. Conclusions: Our findings suggest spontaneous images are an important phenomenon in anxiety disorders in adolescents, associated with negative emotions during and after their occurrence. Contextual factors and adolescents’ own cognitive styles appear to influence adolescents’ experiences of images in anxiety disorders.

How Does the Waking and Sleeping Brain Produce Spontaneous Thought and Imagery, and Why?

Although mind-wandering and dreaming often appear as trivial or distracting cognitive processes, this chapter suggests that they may also contribute to the evaluation, sorting, and saving of representations of recent events of future value to an individual. But 50 years after spontaneous imagery—night dreaming—was first compared to concurrent cortical EEG, there is limited hard evidence on the neural processes that produce either visual dreaming imagery or the speech imagery of waking spontaneous thought. The authors propose here an outline of a neurocognitive model of such processes with suggestions for future research that may contribute to a better understanding of their utility.

Do Athletes Imagine Being the Best, or Crossing the Finish Line First? A Mixed Methods Analysis of Construal Levels in Elite Athletes’ Spontaneous Imagery

The purpose of this article is to illustrate data transformation in a mixed methods research phenomenological study, investigating how athletes use concrete and abstract spontaneous imagery in and around competition. To achieve this, we combined the application of co-occurring codes and numerical transformation in a novel way. A thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with 12 elite athletes identified concrete imagery to focus on strategy generation, error correction, technique, and preparation, and abstract imagery to focus on desirability, symbolic and verbal representations, and regulation of affect, arousal, and mastery. Statistical analysis identified that subjective effectiveness of imagery significantly differed for sport type (reactive/static) and competition times. Researchers wishing to apply statistical analyses to qualitative data are encouraged to employ our methodology.