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