Research on worry during the past 15 years has revealed a remarkable amount of knowledge about this pervasive human phenomenon. Worry involves a predominance of verbal thought activity, functions as a type of cognitive avoidance, and inhibits emotional processing. Worry also produces not only anxious experience but depressive affect as well. Recent evidence suggests that the very private experience of worry is developmentally connected to enmeshed childhood relationships with the primary caregiver and is currently associated with significant interpersonal problems, especially those involving tendency to be overly nurturing to others. At the physiological level, worry is characterized peripherally by parasympathetic deficiency and autonomic rigidity and centrally by left-frontal activation.

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Summary: Four studies are presented investigating the convergent validity, discriminant validity, and relationship with age of the Social Desirability Scale-17 (SDS-17). As to convergent validity, SDS-17 scores showed correlations between .52 and .85 with other measures of social desirability (Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Lie Scale, Sets of Four Scale, Marlowe-Crowne Scale). Moreover, scores were highly sensitive to social-desirability-provoking instructions (job-application instruction). Finally, with respect to the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, SDS-17 scores showed a unique correlation with impression management, but not with self-deception. As to discriminant validity, SDS-17 scores showed nonsignificant correlations with neuroticism, extraversion, psychoticism, and openness to experience, whereas there was some overlap with agreeableness and conscientiousness. With respect to relationship with age, the SDS-17 was administered in a sample stratified for age, with age ranging from 18 to 89 years. In all but the oldest age group, the SDS-17 showed substantial correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Scale. The influence of age (cohort) on mean scores, however, was significantly smaller for the SDS-17 than for the Marlowe-Crowne Scale. In sum, results indicate that the SDS-17 is a reliable and valid measure of social desirability, suitable for adults of 18 to 80 years of age.

The present study presents a replication and methodological extension of MacLeod, Tata, Kentish, and Jacobsen (1997) with a nonclinical sample, using future-directed imagery to assess prospective cognitions. Results showed that only anxiety (but not depression) was related to enhanced imagery for future negative events. Both anxiety and depression showed significant zero-order correlations with reduced imagery for future positive events. However, when the overlap between anxiety and depression was controlled for, only depression (but not anxiety) showed a unique association with reduced imagery for positive events. Implications of these findings for cognitive models of anxiety and depression are discussed.

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) is a widely-used instrument to measure the two components of social desirability: self-deceptive enhancement (SDE) and impression management (IM). With respect to scoring of the BIDR, Paulhus (1994) has authorized two methods, namely continuous scoring (all answers on the continuous answer scale are counted) and dichotomous scoring (only extreme answers are counted). In the present article, three studies with student samples are reported, and continuous and dichotomous scoring of BIDR subscales are compared with respect to reliability, convergent validity, sensitivity to instructional variations, and correlations with personality. Across studies, the scores from continuous scoring (continuous scores) showed higher Cronbach's alphas than those from dichotomous scoring (dichotomous scores). Moreover, continuous scores showed higher convergent correlations with other measures of social desirability and more consistent effects with self-presentation instructions (fake-good versus fake-bad instructions). Finally, continuous SDE scores showed higher correlations with those traits of the five-factor model for which substantial correlations were expected (i.e., neuroticism, extraversion, and conscientiousness). Consequently, the present findings indicate that continuous scoring may be preferable to dichotomous scoring when assessing socially desirable responding with the BIDR. Since the early 1930's, the question of social desirability in self-reports has been a major concern for researchers and practitioners. Consequently, investigators have sought ways to assess social desirability and, if necessary, control for associated distortions in participants' self-reports. One major road in this endeavor was to develop scales to assess individual differences in socially desirable responding. Over the years, numerous such scales have been developed and enjoy wide application in both basic and applied research, even though the use of this practice has been repeatedly called into question (for a recent example, see Piedmont, McCrae, Riemann, & Angleitner, 2000). Nevertheless, socially desirable responding is still a prominent research topic, and continues to present a challenge to psychological measurement and personality assessment (Paulhus, in press).Early attempts to assess socially desirable responding regarded social desirability as a one-dimensional construct. Consequently, measures to assess social desirability--such as the Edwards' Social Desirability Scale (Edwards, 1957), the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960), or the Eysenck Lie Scale (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1964) to mention just a few prominent examples--were one-dimensional in nature.However, the notion that social desirability is a unitary construct became problematic when an increasing number of studies indicated low correlations between different measures of social desirability. This problem was resolved when Paulhus (1984) inspected the correlations between various social-de...