Why worry? The cognitive function of anxiety

doi:10.1016/0005-7967(90)90132-3

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Volume 28, Issue 6, 1990, Pages 455-468

https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967(90)90132-3 Get rights and content

Abstract

The phenomenon of worry is considered to arise from cognitive processes involved in anxiety, that serve to maintain high levels of vigilance for personal danger. Rather than rely on self-report alone, the research described here draws on information processing methodology, to investigate this hypothesized cognitive function. Evidence is summarized to show that anxious subjects selectively attend to threatening information, and interpret ambiguous events in a relatively threatening way. However, the evidence on memory suggests that although such information may be easily activated, it is not necessarily more accessible. The allocation of attentional priority to threatening information is seen as a characteristic of anxious (rather than depressed) mood, while the ease with which this processing mode is adopted may underlie trait anxiety and vulnerability to anxiety disorders.

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High-worry individuals have been assumed to show attentional bias towards threat, particularly under high uncertainty. This study experimentally investigated the effect of uncertainty on attentional bias in subclinical worriers.
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Invited essayWhy worry? The cognitive function of anxiety

Abstract

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Advances in Behaviour and Therapy

Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Advances in Behaviour Research and Therapy

Behaviour Research and Therapy

Cognitive Psychology

Personality and Individual Differences

Behavior Therapy

Judgement of contingency in depressed and non-depressed students: Sadder but wiser?

Journal of Experimental Psychology

Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders

Attention and automaticity in the processing of self-relevant information

Journal of Personality & Social Psychology

Anxiety and its disorders

Anxiety disorders and phobias: A cognitive perspective

Ideational components of anxiety neurosis

Archives of General Psychiatry

The nature of normal and pathological worry

Mood and memory

American Psychologist

Affect and cognition

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London

Selective recall of self-descriptive traits by socially anxious and nonanxious females

Social Behavior & Personality

Anxiety and attentional bias: State and trait

Cognition & Emotion

Anticipatory anxiety and risk perception

Cognitive Therapy and Research

Memory for traumatic events

Applied Cognitive Psychology

Effect of mood on lexical decisions

Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society

Tests of a cognitive theory of panic

Worry and emotionality

Selective processing of threat cues in subjects with panic attacks

Cognition and Emotion

Attention and arousal: Cognition and performance

Anxiety and the worry process

Bulletin of Psychonomic Society

Cognitive functioning in anxiety

Psychological Research

Bias in interpretation of ambiguous sentences related to threat in anxiety

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information

Psychological Bulletin

Sensitivity to feared stimuli in obsessive-compulsives: A dichotic listening analysis

Cognitive Therapy & Research

Construct accessibility and clinical depression: a longtitudinal investigation

Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Invited essay
Why worry? The cognitive function of anxiety