Shorter communicationFractionating the role of executive control in control over worry: A preliminary investigation
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 100 undergraduate students (56% female). All were age 18 or older, with no history of traumatic brain injury, no current stimulant medication, and no current or past antipsychotic medication. As undergraduate samples include the full range of trait worry scores (Ruscio, Borkovec, & Ruscio, 2001), no requirements based on trait worry or GAD status were imposed.
Experimental apparatus
The experiment was administered on Dell Pentium IV desktop computers using E-Prime Professional. Stimuli were presented
Results
Participants who did not understand the task or follow directions (accuracy ≤ 3 SD below the mean) were excluded from analyses (n = 6; 3 each from the Control Thoughts and No Instruction groups). Overall accuracy of the remaining participants was high (M = 92%, SD = 7%) and did not differ by group, t(93) = −0.36, p = .722. Error trials, anticipatory responses (RTs less than 150 ms), and outliers (RTs ≥ 3 SD above or below each participant's mean RT) were also excluded from analyses.
For each
Discussion
Which executive control processes are engaged when a person tries to stop worrying? The present study examined two promising candidates: WM and inhibition. These processes were assessed while participants attempted to control their worried and neutral thoughts. Participants performed more poorly on measures of WM (accuracy) and inhibition (RT) when trying to control worry compared to neutral thought, suggesting that these processes were especially engaged by attempts to control worry. The
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2023, Behaviour Research and TherapyCitation Excerpt :The adverse impact of internally-directed attention on performance is consistent with the notion that internal focus, once initiated, resists attempts to disengage. Although impaired disengagement has been previously observed following experimentally-induced worry (Beckwé & Deroost, 2016; Hallion et al., 2014, 2020), this is the first study to our knowledge to demonstrate an adverse effect of internally-focused attention irrespective of valence. One possible interpretation, given that we used idiographic stimuli for both internal conditions compared with generic external stimuli, is that some of the observed impact may relate either to self-referential processing (Whitfield-Gabrieli & Ford, 2012) or the self-prioritization effect (Sui & Rotshtein, 2019), wherein self-related stimuli more readily capture and maintain attention.
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2020, Behaviour Research and TherapyCitation Excerpt :Because high trait worry participants were not treatment-seeking, this limits our ability to generalize findings to clinically worried individuals. However, previous studies have identified impairment associated with worry in unselected samples (e.g., Hallion et al., 2014), as well as in samples of participants diagnosed with GAD (e.g., Pawluk et al., 2017). Furthermore, we hypothesized that the worry induction would impair problem solving even at low levels of trait worry, thus it was important to demonstrate that findings were not exclusive to a sample with clinically high levels of trait worry.
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