Worrying Leads to Reduced Concreteness of Problem Elaborations: Evidence for the Avoidance Theory of Worry

Both lay concept and scientific theory have embraced the view that nonpathological worry may be helpful for defining and analyzing problems. To evaluate the quality of problem elaborations, concreteness is a key variable. Two studies with nonclinical student samples are presented in which participants elaborated topics associated with different degrees of worry. In Study 1, participants' elaborations were assessed using problem elaboration charts; in Study 2, they were assessed using catastrophizing interviews. When participants' problem elaborations were rated for concreteness, both studies showed an inverse relationship between degree of worry and concreteness: The more participants worried about a given topic the less concrete was the content of their elaboration. The results challenge the view that worry may promote better problem analyses. Instead they conform to the view that worry is a cognitive avoidance response

Reduced concreteness of worry in generalized anxiety disorder: Findings from a therapy study

A sample of clients diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) provided descriptions of the two major problems they worried about and of potential negative consequences associated with these problems, once before and once after they received cognitive-behavioral therapy. When descriptions were rated for concreteness and compared to those of normal controls, results showed that untreated GAD clients provided less concrete descriptions of their major worries relative to controls. After successful therapy, problem descriptions of GAD clients showed the same level of concreteness as those of controls. These findings add further support to the reduced-concreteness theory of worry. Moreover; they; indicate that concretization of worries may play a prominent role in the reduction of pathological worr

Worry: A cognitive phenomenon intimately linked to affective, physiological, and interpersonal behavioral processes

Research on worry during the past 15 years has revealed a remarkable amount of knowledge about this pervasive human phenomenon. Worry involves a predominance of verbal thought activity, functions as a type of cognitive avoidance, and inhibits emotional processing. Worry also produces not only anxious experience but depressive affect as well. Recent evidence suggests that the very private experience of worry is developmentally connected to enmeshed childhood relationships with the primary caregiver and is currently associated with significant interpersonal problems, especially those involving tendency to be overly nurturing to others. At the physiological level, worry is characterized peripherally by parasympathetic deficiency and autonomic rigidity and centrally by left-frontal activation