Metacognitive Style and Stress Vulnerability among Anxiety Disorders:Interpretative Approaches from TAT Narratives

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is one of the projective methods which analyzes the dynamic aspects of personality and is one of the most widely used storytelling technique which uses a narrative approach. The cognitive assumption in TAT is that the cognitive style of the patient often determines whether and how his needs and conflicts will be expressed in thematic content. The present study is aimed at formulating psychopathology formation based on the S-REF model of psychological disorders after Wells and Mathews (1994) and Stress-Vulnerability model (redrawn from Barlow, 2002, with permission) and how it gets influenced by several psychosocial factors of patients suffering from Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Phobia and Mixed Anxiety and Depressive Disorder. The sample consisted of 6 patients, 2 from each group, on whom, Meta-Cognition Questionnaire (MCQ) (Cartwright-Hatton & Wells, 1997), Presumptive Stressful Life Event Scale (PSLES) (Singh et al., 1984), and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) (Morgan & Murray, 1935), were administered along with clinical interviews. Qualitative analysis was done using the presenting complaints of the patients, narrations on TAT and also the findings from the clinical ratings (Datta, Das and Dogra, 2015), thereafter, psychopathology formation for each of the 3 groups was formulated. Results shows that, TAT narratives can also be coded without following a dynamic approach, and that other different models and/or approaches can be employed in different socio-cultural settings. Also, the models employed in the present study focus on the fact that there is presence of both metacognitive tendencies (Wells, 2000) and psychological vulnerability (Brown & Harris, 1978, 1989) towards acquiring the disorders, and definite maintaining factors, leading to the symptoms of the illness as outputs.