2018 Volume 27 Issue 2 Pages 140-148
Scholars have argued that high worriers are prone to worrying about several concerns at the same time. However, there are few studies about processing multiple worry-related information. Thirty-one healthy undergraduate and graduate students (9 male, 22 female; average age: 23.71 years) completed a modified visual search task with two types of stimuli (worry-related and neutral words). In terms of response time, high worriers detected worry-related targets faster than neutral ones when distractors were neutral words, indicating that there was attention facilitation for worry-related words. This process could contribute to the intrusion of worry-related thoughts. In addition, high worriers tend to be slower in detecting targets when worry-related distractors were presented than in the presence of neutral distractor words, indicating that it was difficult to disengage attention from worry-related words. We have discussed clinical implications for anxiety disorders and directions for further research on factors involved in the processing of worry-related words.
