Professor and Director of Clinical Training Georgia State University Atlanta, Georgia
High-anxious individuals may be particularly vulnerable to emotion dysregulation and overreliance on maladaptive coping strategies such as worry (Mennin et al., 2005). Some researchers suggest that high-anxious individuals use worry to avoid negative emotions (Borkovec et al., 1995), whereas others argue that worrying avoids affective contrasts (i.e., maintaining moderate levels of negative affect in order to avoid aversive downward shifts in affect) (Newman & Llera, 2011). These theories present a contradictory picture of worry’s role in emotion regulation, which may be clarified by incorporating theories from non-clinical domains of psychology.
Previous worry research has focused on instrumental beliefs about worry, or rational beliefs regarding the benefits and costs of a behavior. However, instrumental beliefs may be weaker predictors of physiologically activating behaviors (e.g., worry), than are affective beliefs, or beliefs about feelings associated with a behavior. Mood-regulation expectancies, or affective beliefs about the likelihood that a particular coping strategy will reduce negative mood, sometimes predict coping behavior (Friedman-Wheeler et al., 2018) but have been ignored in the worry literature.
In a diverse sample of undergraduates (n=497), we tested the hypothesis that affective beliefs [Coping Expectancies Scale (CES); Friedman-Wheeler et al., 2016] better predict worry behavior [Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ); Meyer et al., 1990] than instrumental beliefs [Consequences of Worrying Scale (COWS); Davey et al., 1996]. We also examined whether trait anxiety [State-Trait Inventory for Cognitive and Somatic Anxiety (STICSA); Ree et al., 2008] is associated with positive affective beliefs about worry (CES; Friedman-Wheeler et al., 2016), and whether contrast avoidance [Contrast Avoidance Questionnaire (CAQ); Llera & Newman, 2017] moderates this association.
A multiple regression analyzing the relationship between affective and instrumental beliefs about worry and worry frequency while controlling for state negative affect was significant overall (F(3, 479)=96.98, p< .001, R2=.379, f2=.610). As predicted, affective beliefs about worry accounted for significant variance in worry behavior over and above instrumental beliefs (t(479)=2.07, p=.039, ß=.077, sr2=.006). We also found a significant relationship between trait anxiety and contrast avoidance and affective beliefs about worry while covarying state negative affect (F(4, 451)=7.122, p< .001, R2=.06, f2=.06). Contrary to our hypothesis, contrast avoidance was a non-significant moderator, however we did find a significant main effect of contrast avoidance (t(451)=3.79, p< .001, ß=.227, sr2=.03).
Our findings represent novel evidence that affective beliefs predict worry behavior and underscore the importance of uniting theories from multiple domains of psychology to clarify relationships between complex constructs. Furthermore, they represent a new line of evidence in support of the contrast avoidance theory of worry. Taken together, these findings have potential to facilitate a more complete conceptualization of beliefs about worry and inform treatments for anxiety targeting those beliefs.
.jpg "Anne E. Werkheiser, B.A. photo")
