A short form of the metacognitions questionnaire: properties of the MCQ-30

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Abstract

The metacognitions questionnaire (MCQ) measures individual differences in a selection of metacognitive beliefs, judgments and monitoring tendencies considered important in the metacognitive model of psychological disorders. The development and properties of a shortened 30-item version of the MCQ, the MCQ-30, are reported. Construct validity was evaluated by confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis. Overall, the fit indices suggested an acceptable fit to a five-factor model consistent with the original MCQ. Exploratory factor analysis supported a five-factor structure, which was almost identical to the original solution obtained in previous studies with the full MCQ. The five factors are cognitive confidence, positive beliefs about worry, cognitive self-consciousness, negative beliefs about uncontrollability of thoughts and danger, and beliefs about need to control thoughts. The MCQ-30 showed good internal consistency and convergent validity, and acceptable to good test–retest reliability. Positive relationships between metacognitions and measures of worry and obsessive–compulsive symptoms provided further support for the validity of the measure and the metacognitive theory of intrusive thoughts. The psychometric properties of MCQ-30 suggest that the instrument is a valuable addition to the assessment of metacognitions that has the advantage of being more economical to use compared with the original MCQ.

Introduction

Metacognition refers to the psychological structures, knowledge, events and processes that are involved in the control, modification and interpretation of thinking itself. According to recent theorizing, metacognition is an important factor in the development and maintenance of psychological disorder (Wells, 2000, Wells and Matthews, 1994). In particular, the Self-Regulatory Executive Function (S-REF: Wells, 2000, Wells and Matthews, 1994, Wells and Matthews, 1996) model provides a detailed conceptualization of metacognitive factors as components of information processing involved in the development and persistence of psychological disturbance. A basic tenet of this approach is that beliefs in psychological disorder consist of a metacognitive component that guides the activity of thinking and coping. More specifically, individuals have positive and negative beliefs about thinking that influences appraisals (e.g. “I must worry in order to be prepared; I cannot control my thoughts”), and they also have implicit procedural metacognitions that form plans or programs for guiding cognition and action. It is the metacognitive component that contributes to maladaptive response styles, which in turn contribute to the development and persistence of psychological disorder. Metacognitions direct the individual to focus attention on disorder congruent information, use inappropriate goals and internal criteria for the basis of cognition and action, engage unhelpful coping strategies of worry/rumination, and use coping strategies such as thought suppression that fail to modify negative appraisals and beliefs. For example, in the metacognitive model of obsessional disorder based on this approach (Wells, 1997), individuals base negative interpretations of intrusive thoughts on beliefs about the importance and influence of such thoughts, and perform neutralizing or checking rituals on the basis of inappropriate criteria that leads to a persistence of appraisal of threat or reduced confidence in memory. The S-REF model has stimulated recent research on different dimensions of metacognition in generalized anxiety disorder (Wells & Carter, 2001), obsessions (Wells & Papageorgiou, 1998), PTSD (Holeva, Tarrier, & Wells, 2001), psychosis (Morrison & Wells, 2003), and depression (Papageorgiou & Wells, 2003).

A burgeoning research base supports the contention that dimensions of metacognition are associated with psychological disorder. However, studies have depended on a small number of self-report instruments that are available for assessing metacognition. Three commonly used measures are the thought control questionnaire (TCQ), the anxious thoughts inventory (AnTI), and the metacognitions questionnaire (MCQ).

The TCQ (Wells & Davies, 1994) is a five-factor scale that measures individual differences in the tendency to select particular strategies for dealing with unpleasant thoughts. The five factorially derived subscales are: distraction, punishment, social control, reappraisal, and worry. The questionnaire has a reliable and stable factor structure across non-patients and patients with major depression and/or PTSD (Reynolds & Wells, 1999). Research with this instrument has demonstrated that particular thought control strategies (i.e. worry, and punishment) are positively associated with indices of emotional disorder (Wells & Davies, 1994) and are elevated in obsessive–compulsive disorder (Amir, Cashman, & Foa, 1997) and acute stress disorder (Warda & Bryant, 1998) patients. Furthermore, the endorsement of TCQ worry strategies predicts the future development of PTSD following road-traffic accidents (Holeva et al., 2001).

The AnTI (Wells, 1994) is a multidimensional measure of proneness to worry, assessing three components: social worry, health worry, and meta-worry. The first two components are strictly non-metacognitive content domains, whilst meta-worry contains items specifically capturing the metacognitive dimension of appraisal of worry itself or “worry about worry”. Research with the AnTI shows that meta-worry is positively associated with trait anxiety, and vulnerability to pathological worry (Wells, 1994, Wells and Carter, 1999, Wells and Carter, 2001). Meta-worry and negative beliefs about worry are considered to be important factors in the metacognitive model of generalized anxiety disorder (Wells, 1995). Meta-worry distinguishes patients with generalized anxiety disorder from patients with panic disorder, social phobia, or non-patients (Wells & Carter, 2001).

The MCQ (Cartwright-Hatton & Wells, 1997) is a 65-item scale developed to assess several dimensions of metacognition thought to be relevant to psychopathology following the conceptual analysis offered by the S-REF theory. The questionnaire comprises five correlated but conceptually distinct factors that assess three domains of positive and negative metacognitive beliefs, metacognitive monitoring, and judgments of cognitive confidence. Alpha reliabilities for the five subscales range from 0.72 to 0.89. The five subscales are: (1) positive beliefs about worry, (2) negative beliefs about thoughts concerning uncontrollability and danger, (3) cognitive confidence (assessing confidence in attention and memory), (4) negative beliefs concerning the consequences of not controlling thoughts, and (5) cognitive self-consciousness (the tendency to focus attention on thought processes).

Studies utilizing the MCQ have demonstrated that negative beliefs about thoughts distinguish GAD patients from other anxiety disorders (Wells & Carter, 2001). Metacognitive factors measured with the MCQ are positively associated with obsessive–compulsive symptoms (Hermans, Martens, De Cort, Pieters and Eelen, 2003, Janeck, Calamari, Riemann and Heffelfinger, 2002, Wells and Papageorgiou, 1998), with pathological worry (Wells & Papageorgiou, 1998), predisposition to auditory hallucinations (Baker and Morrison, 1998, Morrison, Wells and Nothard, 2000), test-anxiety (Matthews, Hillyard, & Cambell, 1999), and depression (Papageorgiou & Wells, 2003).

Future exploration of the role of metacognitive factors in psychopathology will be aided by the continued development of measures of metacognition. Whilst the AnTI and TCQ are brief instruments, the MCQ is restricted in its application by its length. In this paper, we report the psychometric properties of a 30-item version of the MCQ. Further developments of this scale are warranted because it provides a multidimensional measure of metacognitive beliefs and monitoring tendencies most closely linked to the general metacognitive theory of psychological disorder.

Section snippets

Item selection

Six items were selected as representative for each of the five MCQ factors resulting in a 30-item instrument. We used a combination of criteria but principally the loadings of the items reported by Cartwright-Hatton and Wells (1997) as a basis for selecting items for the short MCQ. Any items for which the meaning had been questioned by participants in previous studies were not included, and the highest loading items selected were required to represent the range of thematic components

Preliminary analysis of the MCQ-30

Each item of the MCQ showed a range of endorsements. Examination of the inter-item correlation matrix revealed a predominance of correlations above 0.3 among the items supporting suitability for factoring. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure provides a further means of assessing the homogeneity of variables. The overall KMO measure was 0.90, which was above the suggested minimum of 0.60 (Tabachnick & Fiddell, 1996) indicating that the correlation matrix was suitable for factoring. Mean scores

Discussion

The MCQ-30 is a brief multidimensional measure of metacognitions, that is more economical to use than the original MCQ. The present results show that the instrument and its subscales have good internal consistency, and a factor structure that is consistent with that of the original scale. An assessment of a range of fit indices suggests a good fit with the five-factor model, although there was not complete agreement amongst the fit indices in the confirmatory factor analysis. The exploratory

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Gerry Humphris for his advice on CFA and advice in running of the EQS program.

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