Attentional Bias to Threat in Productive and Unproductive Worry

Abstract

Worry can be productive when it concerns future events we have control over, but unproductive when those events cannot be controlled. We tested the novel hypothesis that to the extent people restrict their attention to threat cues signalling dangers they can potentially control, they may also be better at restricting their worrying to situations over which they have a high (rather than low) degree of control. In 67 participants, we measured the relative magnitude of attentional bias to threat cues signalling more versus less controllable dangers (i.e. alignment). Next, they underwent a speech-related worry induction task in which we assessed worry when the outcome of this task could be controlled (productive worry) and when such control was not possible (unproductive worry). As predicted, greatest attentional bias alignment was observed in those with high productive, low unproductive worry. This has implications for how to target attentional mechanisms in worry-related psychopathology.