Features of metacognitive beliefs of adolescents with a high level of personal anxiety

Abstract

The article contains an analysis of the problems of personal anxiety among adolescents. Anxiety is considered as a property of the personality, which is manifested in the cognitive aspect, emotional reaction, physical reaction and behavior of the individual. The general purpose of the study was to identify the metacognitive beliefs of adolescents with a high level of personal anxiety and was realized thanks to the implementation of such tasks as: identifying adolescents with a high level of personal anxiety, studying personal attitudes towards symptoms, determining and comparing the metacognitive beliefs of adolescents with different levels of personal anxiety, determining predictive power of metacognitions of young people with a high level of personal anxiety.  The results of a study of the prevalence of reactive and personal anxiety among adolescents are presented, a comparative analysis of one's own opinion regarding the presence of symptoms and test results of adolescents with a high level of personal anxiety is carried out. A new approach to the study of personal anxiety from the perspective of metacognitive beliefs is proposed, which is built on the principles of cognitive-behavioral psychology. Metacognition is defined as the basis of automatic thoughts, emotional and physical reactions, and the role of metacognitive processes in the interpretation of information about the level of security, the formation of judgments, assessments. The article proves that the metacognitions of adolescents with a high level of personal anxiety deprive them of flexibility in behavior, limiting the variability of life experience. The metacognitive portrait of young people with a high level of personal anxiety is characterized, in particular: the belief that anxiety is a protection against difficult emotions in anticipation of negative events; a positive attitude towards one's own anxious experiences is reinforced by a desire to prevent negative outcomes. As a result of the conducted research, the prospects for developing a method of targeted psychological influence within the cognitive-behavioral approach have been opened