control group partly included professionals working within the health service. Hence, these participants had a basic knowledge of panic-related phenomena, which could have affected the priming task's results. Given these advantages, our study offers new and advanced insights to the role of automatic associations in PD. Moreover, if successful, variations of the EAST could provide a useful starting point to systematically examine reasons that could account for the previous inconsistent findings (e.g., by comparing different sets of stimuli).