Worry, Thoughts, and Images: A New Conceptualization

Abstract

The present chapter addresses the relations between worry, thoughts, and images. It is organized into three parts. Part 1 outlines T. D. Borkovec's avoidance theory of worry, namely that worry reduces aversive imagery. Part 2 considers two mechanisms by which worry may reduce imagery, namely limitation of processing resources and verbal abstraction. Moreover, as there is little evidence for the first, but some evidence for the latter, Part 2 presents a new conceptual model of the relations between worry, thoughts, and images. Part 3 presents a brief outline beyond anxiety research on how avoidance theory and the verbal abstraction hypothesis may relate to the phenomenon of ruminative coping with depression.

Characteristics of worry in GAD patients, social phobics, and controls

“…Results on the general phenomenological features of worrying confirmed the previous finding [and theoretically appealing assumption, Stöber, 2000] that worrying is mainly a matter of thoughts, not of images (in any group), and thus a cognitive phenomenon. As previously reported [Craske et la., 1989], duration of worry episodes is dramatically longer in GAD patients than in other groups.…”

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“…The present findings add further support to the reduced-concreteness theory of worry (Stöber, 1998(Stöber, , 2000b. According to one aspect of the avoidance theory of worry (Borkovec et al, 1998), worry is a cognitive avoidance response to anxiety-inducing imagery.…”

“…For example, worry and depressive rumination seem to be closely related phenomena. Consequently, cognitive avoidance and reduced concreteness of problem elaborations may also be a significant factor in depression (Borkovec et al, 1998;Stöber, 2000b). Finally, it would be advantageous to examine a larger number of worry topics that differ in degree of associated worry, including also the elaboration of potential antecedents of worrisome problems in order to compare the results obtained with GAD clients to previous findings with nonclinical participants (Stöber, 1996;Stöber et al, 2000).…”

“…One potential solution to this question is presented by the reduced-concreteness theory of worry (Stöber, 1998(Stöber, , 2000b. According to this theory, concreteness of worrisome thought plays a central role in the experience of reduced imagery when worrying.…”

Losing the light at the end of the tunnel: Depression, future thinking, and hope

“…However, given the motivational aspect of hope just discussed, occurrent emotions may provide a psychological source of motivation for gearing our attentional resources and launching cognitive activities directed at the deeper processing, and hence increased vividness, of imagined events. 6 5 Vividness was assessed using the prospective imagery task (PIT; Holmes et al, 2008;Stöber, 2000), a brief paper-based self-report measure. 6 The idea that emotions might play an important role in determining the vividness of mental imagery by providing the underlying motivation for its creation is supported by the fact that anxiety is also correlated with higher vividness of mental imagery for negative events.…”