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The cognitive content of anxiety: Naturalistic evidence for the predominance of threat-related thoughts

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Abstract

Beck's (1976) hypothesis that the experience of anxiety is preceded by thoughts with a content of personal threat or danger was evaluated in a study that controlled for effects due to experimenter expectancy. Seventy introductory psychology students were exposed to one of three types of expectancy “training”: One group was trained to expect threat-related thoughts prior to experiencing anxiety, another group was trained to expect loss-related thoughts, and the final group received a neutral training. Subjects were then asked to record their thoughts preceding anxiety experiences in a free-response journal format. Each response was categorized as either a thought of threat, thought of loss, or other thought, and the number of thoughts falling into each category was the dependent variable. Threat was found to be the predominant cognitive content across groups (p < .001), while training had a small but significant (p < .05)effect on subjects' responses. These results are seen as offering qualified support to Beck's proposed threat-anxiety connection.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, U-20, University of Connecticut, 06268, Storrs, Connecticut, USA

    T. Scott Sewitch & Irving Kirsch

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  1. T. Scott Sewitch
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  2. Irving Kirsch
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Additional information

This article is based on an M.A. thesis by the first author, who was supported during much of its preparation by U. S. Public Health Service Traineeship 5T01MH08929-12. The authors would like to thank George Allen and Charles Lowe for their helpful comments on the research, and Laurie Heatherington, William Matthews, and Eleanor Wertheim for scoring the free-response data.

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Sewitch, T.S., Kirsch, I. The cognitive content of anxiety: Naturalistic evidence for the predominance of threat-related thoughts. Cogn Ther Res 8, 49–58 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01315097

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