Cognitive biases in anxiety disorders and their effect on cognitive-behavioral treatment.

Cognitive theorists hypothesize that cognitive biases are a major component in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. These include attentional biases toward threat-related information, distorted judgments of risk, and selective memory processing. The empirical evidence for these cognitive biases in anxiety disorder populations is reviewed. Potential deleterious effects of these biases on the process of cognitive-behavioral therapy are also discussed, as are possible ways of overriding those effects and maximizing treatment efficacy.