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Objectives. This study aimed to explore the coping styles that agoraphobia sufferers adopt when attempting to cope with symptoms of anxiety and panic. It aimed to extend Watts's (1989) Coping with Anxiety Questionnaire (CAQ) by including items to assess self-vigilance. It was hypothesized that agoraphobia sufferers would adopt consistent coping styles that would be related to symptom severity.
Design. A factor analysis was performed on questionnaire data.
Method. A postal questionnaire was completed by members (N = 112) of a selfhelp group for agoraphobia and panic sufferers. All participants completed the Beck Anxiety Inventory, an Agoraphobia Severity Scale and a slightly modified version of the CAQ. Coping styles were identified via factor analysis of the CAQ items.
Results. Three coping styles were identified, which were labelled Effective Coping, Avoidant Coping and Self-vigilance. The latter two coping styles were found to be correlated with increased levels of agoraphobic symptomatology and with higher levels of anxiety.
Conclusions. The present results support the previous research on coping tactics in anxiety and are compatible with cognitive therapy accounts of the role of selfvigilance in anxiety disorders.
Interest in the concept of coping style, and its relationship to psychological distress, has grown rapidly over the past few years (e.g. Zeidner & Endler,1996). As a result, there is now a considerable body of evidence demonstrating that coping style is related to a person's level of adjustment to a broad range of problems, including chronic pain (Malone & Strube, 1988), tinnitus (Budd & Pugh, 1996a, b), traumatic events (Dunmore, Clark & Ehlers, 1997; Morgan, Mathews & Winton, 1995) and phobias (Davey, Burgess & Rashes, 1995).
Various conceptual models of coping style have been proposed. The model of Holahan & Moos (1990, 1991) distinguishes between the basic coping styles of approach vs. avoidance coping, with Ferguson & Cox (1997) having recently presented further evidence to support this distinction between these two basic coping styles. In addition, it is possible to make a further distinction between the cognitive and behavioural domains, so yielding four main coping styles: cognitive avoidance (e.g. `trying to forget a bad experience ') vs. cognitive approach (e.g. `making a plan of action to follow'), along with behavioural avoidance vs. behavioural approach. This conceptualization of Coping Style is operationalized by...