Intolerance of uncertainty in emotional disorders: What uncertainties remain?

The current paper presents a future research agenda for intolerance of uncertainty (IU), which is a transdiagnostic risk and maintaining factor for emotional disorders. In light of the accumulating interest and promising research on IU, it is timely to emphasize the theoretical and therapeutic significance of IU, as well as to highlight what remains unknown about IU across areas such as development, assessment, behavior, threat and risk, and relationships to cognitive vulnerability factors and emotional disorders. The present paper was designed to provide a synthesis of what is known and unknown about IU, and, in doing so, proposes broad and novel directions for future research to address the remaining uncertainties in the literature

A Transdiagnostic Investigation of Intolerance of Uncertainty on Anxiety Symptomology and Decision-Making

Intolerance of uncertainty (IU) is implicated in the development and maintenance of psychopathology and is associated with symptom reduction across clinical interventions. As such, IU is conceptualised to be a transdiagnostic and transtherapeutic process. The findings of this research programme highlight the potential significance of disorder-specific IU as a proximal pathway between trait IU and psychopathology, and provide insight into the structure of IU and its association with threat perception and decision-making behaviour across contexts

Evaluation of Magical Thinking: Validation of the Illusory Beliefs Inventory

Magical thinking has been related to obsessive–compulsive disorder; yet, little research has examined this construct in other anxiety disorders. The Illusory Beliefs Inventory (IBI) is a recently developed measure of magical thinking. The aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of this new measure and to determine if magical thinking accounts for pathological worry beyond the well-researched constructs of intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and perfectionism. A sample of 502 participants completed an online survey. Confirmatory factor analysis identified a three-factor solution for the IBI, and the measure had good internal consistency (a ¼ .92), test–retest reliability (r ¼ .94) and discriminant validity. Magical thinking, IU, and perfectionism all predicted pathological worry; however, magical thinking accounted for less than 1% of unique variance in worry, suggesting that it is not strongly related to worry. Further investigation regarding the validity and clinical utility of the IBI is required