Cognitive Control of Acute Symptoms during a 35% Co2 Challenge

The current study evaluated the performance of an emergent construct known as effortful control (EC) in predicting fearful responding to a biological stressor. EC refers to an individual difference variable thought to describe the ability to 1) inhibit a given prepotent response and 2) enact a subdominant response. Developmental and clinical literatures have both supported the utility of EC in predicting outcomes in child and youth samples, however the current study represents a first attempt to document the structure and function of EC in an adult sample. Accordingly, Psychometric, convergent and discriminant properties as well as latent structural properties of EC measures were evaluated. Hypothesis 1 concerned the psychometric and structural properties of the Attentional Control Scale (ACS) and Effortful Control Scale (ECS), while hypothesis 2 specified that EC should be discriminable from, but more related to anxiety than depression, and hypothesis three concerned the moderational status of EC with respect to predicting dependent measures of fear in response to a single vital capacity breath of a 35% CO2 gas mixture. Hypotheses 1 and 2 were supported, while hypothesis three was only partially supported. Although a moderational effect was not observed for EC, regression-based analyses and follow-up analyses in multivariate and repeated-measures GLM supported a consistent main effect for EC in predicting fear. Implications for information processing models of anxiety are discussed.