Social problem solving and trait anxiety as predictors of worry in a college student population

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Abstract

This study examined the relations between trait anxiety, social problem-solving ability, and two different measures of worry in a sample of 353 college students. The worry measures were the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ), which measures worry frequency, uncontrollability, and distress, and the Catastrophic Worry Questionnaire (CWQ), which assesses extreme negative outcome expectancies associated with worry. Results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that social problem-solving ability accounted for a significant amount of variance in both worry measures even after trait anxiety was controlled. Three different dimensions of social problem-solving ability were found to be significantly associated with worry. Negative problem orientation was positively related to both worry measures after controlling for trait anxiety. In addition, rational problem solving and impulsivity/carelessness style were both positively related to the CWQ after controlling for trait anxiety and problem orientation, which suggests that catastrophic worry has both constructive and dysfunctional problem-solving aspects that cannot be accounted for by the person's problem orientation. The implications of these findings for theory, research, and practice were discussed.

Section snippets

Participants

The participants in this study were 355 undergraduate college students (63% female) enrolled in two introductory psychology courses at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The participants' mean age was 18.85 years (S.D.=1.57). The breakdown of ethnic origin in the sample was as follows: 44.2% identified themselves as Caucasian/White, 29% as Asian, Asian American, or Pacific Islander, 10.4% as African American/Black, 7.6% as Hispanic or Latino, and 8.5% as of other ethnic origins.

Results

Because prior research has demonstrated significant gender differences in self-report measures of social problem-solving ability (D'Zurilla, Maydeu-Olivares, & Kant, 1998), worry (Meyer et al., 1990) and trait anxiety (Spielberger, 1983), a series of independent samples t-tests using gender as the between-groups variable was conducted for all measures to determine if gender differences were evident in the present sample. For the social problem-solving measures, men were found to score

Discussion

The results of this study both support and extend previous research findings on the relations between social problem solving and worry. Our findings replicate and confirm the results of previous studies which showed that worrying is associated with a poor problem orientation (Davey, 1994b, Davey et al., 1992, Davey et al., 1996, Dugas et al., 1995, Dugas et al., 1997). However, because a unidimensional measure of problem orientation was used in these studies, it cannot be determined from

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank Marvin R. Goldfried for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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