Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles (Department of Psychology; Anxiety and Depression Research Center). Trained in the David Barlow tradition of anxiety-disorder research.
- Orientation: Cognitive-behavioural clinical psychology of anxiety; exposure-based treatment and its mechanisms (fear extinction, inhibitory learning). Interoception enters as the input to catastrophic misinterpretation in panic, and as the target of interoceptive exposure — the treatment she is most associated with in this wiki.
Key contributions
- Senior author of the wiki’s first first-hand replication of the founding cardiac-perception group difference (Ehlers & Breuer 1992): infrequent panickers count their heartbeats more accurately than nonanxious controls, in an analogue sample, from a lab outside Ehlers’s Marburg lineage (Zoellner & Craske (1999)).
- Ran the wiki’s only within-sample manipulations of arousal (caffeine) and state anxiety on the counting task. The arousal manipulation missed the cardiac channel (HR flat); the state-anxiety effect improved the score in a way the validity debate reads as either attention or artefact.
- Originator of Interoceptive exposure in panic treatment (Craske et al. 1997) — the technique of deliberate, non-avoidant contact with feared bodily sensations, which the wiki carries as a method page and whose ‘established efficacy’ claim traces to her work. Known here by citation for the treatment itself; read first-hand only for the 1999 measurement study.
- A central figure in the exposure-therapy and inhibitory-learning literature the wiki’s clinical pages lean on but has largely not read (Craske & Freed 1995 on arousal-expectancy, cited within the 1999 study; the broader Barlow/Craske panic-treatment programme).
Key papers
- Zoellner, L. A., & Craske, M. G. (1999). Interoceptive accuracy and panic. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37, 1141-1158. — Zoellner & Craske (1999), the only Craske paper the wiki has read first-hand. In
raw/.- Craske, M. G., Barlow, D. H., et al. (1997) and related work on interoceptive exposure for panic — the source of the Interoceptive exposure page’s efficacy claim, reached via Farb et al. (2015). Not in
raw/.- Craske, M. G., & Freed, S. (1995). Expectations about arousal and nocturnal panic. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 104, 567-575. — cited in the 1999 study for the finding that arousal can be modulated by cognitive/expectancy variables. Not in
raw/.
Connections
- Debates: Is the heartbeat-counting task a valid measure of cardiac perception?, Is more interoceptive awareness better?
- Related researchers: Anke Ehlers, Rainer Schandry, Edward Katkin
One of the field’s principal anxiety-disorder researchers, and the Interoceptive exposure page’s presiding figure — but she enters the wiki through a single measurement study, Zoellner & Craske (1999), read first-hand.
She is filed here for the Schandry/Katkin/Ehlers reason: a name doing load-bearing work across the wiki’s clinical pages — Interoceptive exposure rests on her treatment programme, and Cognitive model of panic and Interoceptive training in clinical practice inhabit the literature she helped build — while almost none of that work is in raw/. The one paper the wiki has actually read is the 1999 heartbeat study, where she is senior (second) author to Lori Zoellner. Nothing on this page should be read as a summary of her career, which centres on exposure-based treatment of anxiety and its learning mechanisms far more than on interoceptive measurement.
What the 1999 study establishes
Zoellner & Craske (1999) does three things the wiki did not have first-hand:
- It replicates the founding group difference from outside Ehlers’s lab. Infrequent panickers counted their heartbeats more accurately than controls (44.7% vs 61.7% error at baseline; 35.6% vs 53.0% across trials), and the difference survived covarying self-rated confidence and felt cardiac arousal. Every other version of this finding the wiki holds is Ehlers’s own or a reanalysis of pooled data she contributed to. This one is independent.
- It runs the arousal experiment on the wrong variable. Caffeine raised electrodermal, muscular and metabolic arousal but not heart rate, and accuracy did not move — so the study’s headline conclusion (“accuracy is unrelated to arousal”) holds only for non-cardiac arousal and does not bear on the cardiodynamic confound, which is about the cardiac signal specifically.
- It supplies a within-subject anxiety→accuracy effect that the wiki’s two camps read oppositely. Error fell as state anxiety rose, with no inverted-U. Craske and Zoellner read it as anxiety magnifying attention to the body (the attentional-bias tradition); the validity debate reads the same unsigned-error pattern as the count-inflation artefact. The study cannot decide between them.
The connection the wiki should keep in view
Craske’s larger significance here is as the origin of Interoceptive exposure — deliberate, non-avoidant contact with feared interoceptive sensation, the “most common application of interoceptive evaluation in current clinical practice” per the Khalsa et al. roadmap. That page’s standing gap is that the wiki has read no efficacy trial for it; the treatment’s “established efficacy” phrasing is inherited from Craske et al. (1997) via Farb et al. and softened by the roadmap’s more sober assessment. If a Craske treatment paper ever reaches raw/, it would close one of the clinical side’s most-flagged holes. For now she is, like Ehlers before the 1993 review arrived, a figure the wiki cites more than it reads.