Chronic worry as avoidance of arousal

The purpose of this research was to test the theory that worry is primarily a conceptual process that leads to a suppression of imagery and subsequent psychophysiological arousal which maintains the worry process. It was hypothesized that (a) worriers would report more thoughts than image when listening to a worrisome scenario, (b) worriers would avoid listening to the worrisome scenario due to discomfort associated with these images and (c) worriers would instead focus on the unattended channel despite instructions not to do so. The first study involved a group of 30 college students who were not divided by group. The second study involved two groups of participants (22 chronic worriers and 24 normals controls). All participants in Study 1 completed a dichotic listening task involving neutral words being presented in the unattended ear across two conditions (neutral scenario, worry scenario) as a worry-related story and a neutral story were presented in the attended ear. Participants were then given a surprise recognition task of words presented to the unattended ear. Participants in Study 2 completed the same task but were also monitored for psychophysiological activity using skin conductance and skin temperature. Results did not support the above 3 hypotheses. Methodological issues are discussed as well as recommendations for future research