Worry

This international study in 42 countries inquired children’s perception of the coronacrisis, their knowledge on COVID-19 and the role the media play in this. It Shows that children who are better informed about COVID-19 and can identify Fake News are less "very worried" about the corona-Virus.

Objective: This article advocates multidimensional assessment of task stress in human factors and reviews the use of the Dundee Stress State Questionnaire (DSSQ) for evaluation of systems and operators. Background: Contemporary stress research has progressed from an exclusive focus on environmental stressors to transactional perspectives on the stress process. Performance impacts of stress reflect the opera-tor's dynamic attempts to understand and cope with task demands. Multidimensional stress assessments are necessary to gauge the different forms of system-operator interaction. Method: This review discusses the theoretical and practical use of the DSSQ in evaluating multidimensional patterns of stress response. It presents psychometric evidence for the multidimensional perspective and illustrative profiles of subjective state response to task stressors and environments. Evidence is also presented on stress state correlations with related variables, including personality, stress process measures , psychophysiological response, and objective task performance. Results: Evidence supports the validity of the DSSQ as a task stress measure. Studies of various simulated environments show that different tasks elicit different profiles of stress state response. Operator characteristics such as resilience predict individual differences in state response to stressors. Structural equation modeling may be used to understand performance impacts of stress states. Conclusion: Multidimensional assessment affords insight into the stress process in a variety of human factors contexts. Integrating subjective and psychophysiologi-cal assessment is a priority for future research. Application: Stress state measurement contributes to evaluating system design, countermeasures to stress and fatigue, and performance vulnerabilities. It may also support personnel selection and diagnostic monitoring of operators.

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.

Theories of cognitive therapy have long proposed that those with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) have inaccurate expectations. By challenging them with objective evidence, symptoms are thought to decrease. To test these premises, this study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) during the Worry Outcome Journal (WOJ) treatment to determine the percentage of GAD worries that did not come true. We then analyzed the association between participants' untrue worry percentages and GAD symptom change across treatment. Twenty-nine participants with GAD recorded worries when prompted for 10 days, reviewed them online nightly, and tracked their worry outcomes across 30 days. These recordings were then coded by independent raters. Analyses applied bias-correct bootstrapping path analysis on slopes extracted from longitudinal linear mixed models. Primary results revealed that 91.4% of worry predictions did not come true. Higher percentages of untrue worries significantly predicted lower GAD symptoms after treatment, as well as a greater slope of symptom reduction from pre-to post-trial. Participants' average expected likelihoods of worries coming true were much greater than actual observed likelihoods. The most common percentage of untrue worries per person was 100%. Thus, worries in those with GAD were mostly inaccurate. Greater evidence of this inaccuracy predicted greater improvement in treatment. As theorized, disconfirming false expectations may significantly contribute to treatment's effect.

Objective: The aims of this review article are to present psychophysiological and behavioral pathways for the involvement of worry and generalized anxiety disorder
(GAD) upon cardiovascular function. The review will focus on persons with and without coronary heart disease (CHD), and encompass etiological and prognostic studies. Methods: Articles (1975–2011) reporting on GAD or worry affecting CHD prognosis or cardiovascular function were found using MEDLINE, EMBASE, SCOPUS and PsychINFO database searches, and extracted to form a narrative review.
Results: Available evidence in experimental and observational studies in CHD free samples consistently showed that worry was associated with diminished heart rate variability (HRV) and elevated heart rate. Worry and GAD were commonly associated
with blood pressure and diagnosed hypertension or medication use in both disease free and established CHD populations. No evidence was found to support worry being beneficial to cardiovascular function or conducive to health promoting behaviors. The literature indicated that measures of worry were associated with fatal and nonfatal CHD in seven etiological studies of initially disease-free individuals; however,
females were underrepresented. Three studies reported that GAD was associated with poorer prognosis in establish CHD, independent of depression. The median GAD prevalence was 10.4% in 3266 patients across 15 studies, suggesting that GAD
is marginally less common in CHD samples than is depression. Conclusions: A growing literature highlights the association between worry and development of CHD. The association between worry, GAD and CHD risk factors (e.g. blood pressure), and HRV are leading mechanisms of cardiopathogenesis that may affect cardiovascular function. Findings regarding worry and GAD in established CHD are less clear.

The writings in this volume are bound by desire to refuse worry, to reject and throw it away the only way possible, by means that are themselves free from worry. If this is impossible—all the more reason to do so.

I. The Sweetness (of the Law)
II. Nunc Dimittis: Getting Anagogic
III. Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia
IV. Wormsign
V. Gourmandized in the Abattoir of Openness
VI. Grave Levitation: Being Scholarly
VII. Labor, Language, Laughter: Aesop and the Apophatic Human
VIII. This is Paradise: The Heresy of the Present
IX. Becoming Spice: Commentary as Geophilosophy
X. Amor Fati: A Prosthetic Gloss
XI. Following the Sigh

Worry, rumination, and obsessive thinking are theorized to differ on temporal orientation, positive perceived function, degree of intrusiveness, and discordance with one's self-concept. However, prior findings with respect to such differences may be due to method variance of the measures used and/or inclusion of items confounded by diagnostic symptoms. Accurately capturing differences between types of perseverative thought linked to psychopathology and understanding whether such aspects are common across disorders or specific to some may be important to designing effective treatments for them. Two studies are presented detailing the development and validation of the Perseverative Cognitions Questionnaire (PCQ). The PCQ is a 45-item self-report measure that assesses six dimensional characteristics of worry, rumination, and obsessive thinking previously found to discriminate these thought styles: Lack of Controllability, Preparing for the Future, Expecting the Worst, Searching for Causes/Meaning, Dwelling on the Past, and Thinking Discordant with Ideal Self. Factor structure of the PCQ was established using principal components, exploratory factor, and confirmatory factor analyses. PCQ scales exhibited differential convergence with measures of perseverative thought and psychopathology. The PCQ also demonstrated acceptable retest correlations across 1- and 2-week periods, and incremental validity when predicting symptoms of anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive​ disorder.

This essay attempts an intellectual attack upon everything in us that rises in revolt against this statement, against all that would dismiss out of hand the reality of its truth and confine its meaning to the realm of sentimental metaphysics. Likewise, it stands in defense of everything that already feels and knows this statement’s correctness, not as concept, but as immanent fact: the universal fact of essential sweetness. I pursue this two-fold aim by investigating the relation between sweetness and the law, because it is precisely via a stimulation and vexation of our sense of law that the statement of the universal fact of essential sweetness impresses us. The inversive and profoundly intimate link between these terms is found in the bitter waters of Marah (Exodus 15: 25), which I interpret in light of medieval mystical ideas about the immanence of paradise in order to argue for the universal ontological illegality of worry. At the still point or moment of identity that forms the crux of the law/sweetness relation, is found the highest anagogical sense of law, the impossible yet inevitable taste of eternal justice.

Masciandaro, N. 2018. The Sweetness (of the Law). In: Pavoni, A et al, TASTE. London: University of Westminster Press.

In this chapter, I argue that part of the answer to the problem of worry is to be found in a certain view of humility: one that can be teased out from several Kierkegaardian discourses, and which has recently been gaining increasing support—from both philosophers and psychologists—against competing views of humility. Humility is understood not in terms of self-abasement, underestimating oneself, or being ignorant of one’s good qualities, but rather in terms of being focused on others and sources of value besides oneself: thinking not less of oneself, but thinking less about oneself. Exploring the centrality of future-oriented worries to Kierkegaard’s lily and bird discourses in particular, I argue that such worries often stem from excessive, debilitating self-absorption, which the variety of humility sketched here enables us to avoid. I aim to show how this conception of humility addresses questions such as how those of impressive achievements may nevertheless remain humble, and why its relative lack of self-focus does not rule out the possibility of self-improvement.

Operators of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) face a variety of stress factors resulting from both the cognitive demands of the work and its broader social context. Dysfunctional metacognitions including those concerning worry may increase stress vulnerability, whereas personality traits including hardiness and grit may confer resilience. The present study utilized a simulation of UAS operation requiring control of multiple vehicles. Two stressors were manipulated independently in a within-subjects design: cognitive demands and negative evaluative feedback. Stress response was assessed using both subjective measures and a suite of psychophysiological sensors, including the electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocardiogram (ECG), and hemodynamic sensors. Both stress manipulations elevated subjective distress and elicited greater high-frequency activity in the EEG. However, predictors of stress response varied across the two stressors. The Anxious Thoughts Inventory (AnTI: Wells, 1994) was generally associated with higher state worry in both control and stressor conditions. It also predicted stress reactivity indexed by EEG and worry responses in the negative feedback condition. Measures of hardiness and grit were associated with somewhat different patterns of stress response. In addition, within the negative feedback condition, the AnTI meta-worry scale moderated relationships between state worry and objective performance and psychophysiological outcome measures. Under high state worry, AnTI meta-worry was associated with lower frontal oxygen saturation, but higher spectral power in high-frequency EEG bands. High meta-worry may block adaptive compensatory effort otherwise associated with worry. Findings support both the metacognitive theory of anxiety and negative emotions (Wells and Matthews, 2015), and the Trait-Stressor-Outcome (TSO: Matthews et al., 2017a) framework for resilience.

This paper attempts to provide a conceptual framework placing anxiety in a perceived control
perspective. We analyse the basic cognitive components of anxiety with reference to the need for
control, both pragmatic and epistemic.We address the difference between fear and anxiety by pointing
to the special role played in anxiety by the need for epistemic control and uncertainty reduction. We
examine some typical ‘‘questions’’ of anxiety, and some typical ‘‘answers’’ or coping strategies, with
special reference to their relationships with either need for control. We focus on the need for epistemic
control, its relationship with pragmatic control, its impact on the amount of anxiety experienced, and
its role in anxiety-proneness. We address worry and its relationships with anxiety and the needs for
control. Finally, we compare our approach with related models, point to its implications for clinical
treatment, and discuss the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes in anxiety.
Keywords: Anxiety, fear, epistemic control, pragmatic control, uncertainty, worry

Perseverative cognition (i.e., rumination, worry) may amplify or maintain cortisol stress responses. The present study examined the effects of trait and state perseverative cognition (PC) on the cortisol awakening response (CAR). We hypothesized that trait PC and state (prior day's) PC would be associated with greater CARs. Undergraduates scoring high (N=77) and low (N=42) on trait PC were included. Participants reported worries about upcoming events and ruminations on past events that occurred throughout the day as a measure of state PC. The next morning, saliva samples were collected 0, 30, 45, and 60min after awakening to assess the CAR. Area under the curve (AUC) and 30-min increase (30-min Inc) were calculated to capture the salivary cortisol total output and increase relative to baseline in the hour after awakening. There was no effect of trait PC on the CAR. In contrast, reports of worrying and/or ruminating the night before predicted greater increases in cortisol concentration and total cortisol output compared to those who neither ruminated nor worried the night before. These effects were not accounted for by depressed mood, anxiety, sleep, or recent stressors. Findings suggest differential effects of trait and state PC on the CAR and highlight the importance of using proximal measures in examining individual differences in the CAR.

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a transdiagnostic process involved in the risk, maintenance, and relapse of serious conditions including mood disorders, anxiety, eating disorders, and addictions. Processing mode theory provides a theoretical model to assess, research, and treat RNT using a transdiagnostic approach. Clinical researchers also often employ categorical approaches to RNT, including a focus on depressive rumination or worry, for similar purposes. Three widely used self-report questionnaires have been developed to assess these related constructs: the Ruminative Response Scale (RRS), the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire (PTQ), and the Mini-Cambridge Exeter Repetitive Thought Scale (Mini-CERTS). Yet these scales have not previously been used in conjunction, despite useful theoretical distinctions only available in Mini-CERTS. The present validation of the methods in a Polish speaking population provides psychometric parameters estimates that contribute to current efforts to increase reliable replication of theoretical outcomes. Moreover, the following study aims to present particular characteristics and a comparison of the three methods. Although there has been some exploration of a categorical approach, the comparison of transdiagnostic methods is still lacking. These methods are particularly relevant for developing and evaluating theoretically based interventions like concreteness training, an emerging field of increasing interest, which can be used to address the maladaptive processing mode in RNT that can lead to depression and other disorders. Furthermore, the translation of these measures enables the examination of possible cross-cultural structural differences that may lead to important theoretical progress in the measurement and classification of RNT. The results support the theoretical hypothesis. As expected, the dimensions of brooding, general repetitive negative thinking, as well as abstract analytical thinking, can all be classified as unconstructive repetitive thinking. The particular characteristics of each scale and potential practical applications in clinical and research are discussed.

Mindfulness meditation techniques are increasingly popular both as a life-style choice and therapeutic adjunct for a range of mental and physical health conditions. However, little is known about the mechanisms through which mindfulness meditation and its constituent practices might produce positive change in cognition and emotion. Our study directly compared the effects of Focused Attention (FA) and Open-Monitoring (OM) meditation on alerting, orienting and executive attention network function in healthy individuals. Participants were randomized to three intervention groups: open-focused meditation, focused attention, and relaxation control. Participants completed an emotional variant of the Attention Network Test (ANT) at baseline and post-intervention. OM and FA practice improved executive attention, with no change observed in the relaxation control group. Improvements in executive attention occurred in the absence of change in subjective/self-report mood and cognitive function. Baseline levels of dispositional/trait mindfulness were positively correlated with executive control in the ANT at baseline. Our results suggest that mindfulness meditation might usefully target deficits in executive attention that characterise mood and anxiety disorders.

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.

In today's world, the vast majority of the population suffers with intellectual illness, and lots of them are unaware of it. Some humans are too afraid to talk about mental illness due to the fact they don't know enough about it. However, humans should understand that our mental fitness is simply as crucial as our physical fitness. As a result, this mental health app is designed for such folks so that we can recognize and deal with their mental health issues. They might not need to worry about society and decorate their health on their own with the assistance of this application. This application will ask the person some easy questions about their daily habits and assign them day by day assignments. It will additionally tune their progress at the dashboard and will keep a separate diagnosis page. To diagnose a person, it's going to ask a few questions with four answers and assign a mark to each choice. At the end of the questions, it's going to calculate the users' marks and display the results, in addition to suggesting a few vital steps. It is going to additionally include different elements which includes video games, music, and a chatbot to keep the users' minds lively and healthful.

Non-adherence to COVID-19 guidelines may be attributable to low levels of worry. This study assessed whether endorsing COVID-19-stigmatizing restrictions, COVID-19 knowledge, and preferred news source were associated with being 'very worried' versus 'not at all' or 'somewhat' worried about contracting COVID-19. Survey data were collected in July-August 2020 from N = 547 New York State (NYS) and N = 504 national Amazon MTurk workers. Respondents who endorsed COVID-19 stigmatizing restrictions (NYS OR 1.96; 95% CI 1.31, 2.92; national OR 1.80; 95% CI 1.06, 3.08) and consumed commercial news (NYS OR 1.89; 95% CI 1.21, 2.96; national OR 1.93; 95% CI 1.24, 3.00) were more likely to be very worried. National respondents who consumed The New York Times (OR 1.52; 95% CI 1.00, 2.29) were more likely to be very worried, while those with little knowledge (OR 0.24; 95% CI 0.13, 0.43) were less likely to be very worried. NYS (OR 2.66; 95% CI 1.77, 4.00) and national (OR 3.17; 95% CI 1.95, 5.16) respondents with probable depression were also more likely to be very worried. These characteristics can help identify those requiring intervention to maximize perceived threat to COVID-19 and encourage uptake of protective behaviors while protecting psychological wellbeing.

Only for ergodic processes will inferences based on group-level data generalize to individual experience or behavior. Because human social and psychological processes typically have an individually variable and time-varying nature, they are unlikely to be ergodic. In this paper, six studies with a repeated-measure design were used for symmetric comparisons of interindividual and intraindividual variation. Our results delineate the potential scope and impact of nonergodic data in human subjects research. Analyses across six samples (with 87–94 participants and an equal number of assessments per participant) showed some degree of agreement in central tendency estimates (mean) between groups and individuals across constructs and data collection paradigms. However, the variance around the expected value was two to four times larger within individuals than within groups. This suggests that literatures in social and medical sciences may overestimate the accuracy of aggregated statistical estimates. This observation could have serious consequences for how we understand the consistency between group and individual correlations, and the gen-eralizability of conclusions between domains. Researchers should explicitly test for equivalence of processes at the individual and group level across the social and medical sciences. research methodology | replicability | idiographic science | generalizability | ecological fallacy I nferences made in social and medical research typically result from statistical tests conducted on aggregated data. The implicit assumption is that group-derived estimates can be applied to understanding individual phenomenology, physiology, and behavior. However, statistical findings at the interindividual (group) level only generalize to the intraindividual (person) level if the processes in question are ergodic (1). Ergodic processes are equivalent for groups and individuals (homogeneity criterion) when their mean and variance remain consistent over time (stationarity criterion) (2). Because psychological and biological phenomena are organized within persons over time, generalizations that rely on group estimates are nonergodic if there are individual exceptions. Group estimates can be derived from a cross-sectional measurement of individuals at one point in time, but intraindividual analyses require data collected over time—as the sample size becomes the number of repeated observations. Just as a random sample is required to be representative of a population to support generalizable claims about that population, the data sampled within an individual in time must be representative of that individual generally (i.e., stationary). When group generalizations obscure genuine individual differences, we may fail to describe natural processes and their natural kinds (3). If scientific consilience (4) and completeness (5) are our goals, this scenario should be avoided. In this paper, we contend that (i) nonergodicity—specifically, the lack of generalizability from group to individual statistical estimates—is a threat to human subjects research, because we do not know the full scope of the problem and are not adequately studying it; and (ii) that scientists need to demonstrate the consistency between individual and group variability before generalizing results across levels of analysis. We will refer to this latter condition as the " group-to-individual generalizability " of a given statistical estimate. However, whether couched in prosaic terms, or within formal mathematical theorems, researchers have not systematically examined such generalizability in extant lit-eratures, despite a number of calls to do so throughout the years (cf. refs. 6–11). Hitherto, the highest-impact publications in medical and social sciences have been largely based on data aggregated across large samples, with best-practice guidelines almost exclusively based on statistical inferences from group designs. The worst-case scenario—a global, uniform absence of group-to-individual generalizability due to nonergodicity in the social and medical sciences—would undermine the validity of our scientific canon in these domains. However, even moderate incongruities between group and individual estimates could result in imprecise or potentially invalid conclusions. We argue that this possibility should be formally tested, wherever possible, to be ruled out. Ergodicity, the Ecological Fallacy, and Simpson's Paradox The ergodic theorem is a general and formal mathematical expression that deals with the generalizability of statistical phenomena across levels and units of analysis. [While a more thorough explication of the ergodic theorem is outside of the scope of the present paper, readers are referred to Molenaar (1) for a comprehensive mathematical treatment of ergodicity in human subjects research.] Ergodic theory postulates that the Significance The current study quantified the degree to which group data are able to describe individual participants. We utilized intensive repeated-measures data—data that have been collected many times, across many individuals—to compare the distributions of bivariate correlations calculated within subjects vs. those calculated between subjects. Because the vast majority of social and medical science research aggregates across subjects, we aimed to assess how closely such aggregations reflect their constituent individuals. We provide evidence that conclusions drawn from aggregated data may be worryingly imprecise. Specifically, the variance in individuals is up to four times larger than in groups. These data call for a focus on idiography and open science that may substantially alter best-practice guidelines in the medical and behavioral sciences.

This work introduces the “Worry Inventory for Managers” (WIM), a 24-item measure of job-related worries in managers. A sample of 138 managers responded to the WIM and to measures of pathological worry, job involvement, and self-reliance. Factor analysis of the WIM revealed two facets of job-related worry, namely worry about (a) organizational processes and about (b) work overload. Results indicate that job-related worry shows differential correlations from pathological worry with the three factors of self-reliance (counterdependence, overdependence, and interdependence).

The 2014 Ebola crisis received unprecedented media attention in the United States, despite low risk of transmission. We examined theoretically derived correlates of psychological response to the crisis, including Ebola-related media exposure, prior mental health history, and stress response to a recent prior collective trauma (the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, BMB). A national probability sample completed a survey 2–4 weeks post-BMB; 18 months later, the same sample reported responses to the Ebola crisis (N = 3,447). History of mental health diagnoses, acute stress response to the BMB, and Ebola-related media exposure were associated with greater psychological distress and functional impairment. Prior acute stress and Ebola-related media exposure were also associated with Ebola-related worry; individuals with higher BMB-related acute stress who consumed more Ebola-related media were more worried about contracting Ebola. Media coverage of the Ebola public health crisis was associated with negative psychological outcomes, even among individuals at low risk for contracting the disease.

Cognitive theory conceptualizes worry as influenced by metacognitive beliefs about worry, intolerance of uncertainty, and perceptions of control over events and reactions. This study tests the hypothesis that the effect of intolerance of uncertainty would interact with meta-cognitive beliefs on worry and perceived control. One hundred eighteen individuals with generalized anxiety disorder and 54 controls completed the Meta-Cognition Questionnaire, the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale, the Anxiety Control Scale, and the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Models were tested measuring interactive effects in multiple regression linear analysis. The interaction model was confirmed. The effect of intolerance of uncertainty on worry was increased by its interaction with metacognitive and control beliefs. The finding emphasizes the significant role of metacognitive and control beliefs in the cognitive process that leads to the development of worry.

Equanimity during mindfulness meditation is considered in relation to some examples of repetitive thinking, including rumination and worry. It may not always be possible to treat the content of the automatic stream of primary process thinking with equanimity, and some implications in relation to mental health and the value of psychotherapy are noted. Aspects of the meditation state are considered in relation to some aspects of the creative process, including incubation and insight.

This study investigates features that differentiate worry from somatic anxiety and depression. Theoretical models of the worry process suggest that worry is closely related to procrastination. In addition, research on worry and elevated evidence requirements proposes a relationship between worry and perfectionism. Perfectionism, however, is multidimensional in nature. Moreover, previous research has linked procrastination and perfectionism mainly to anxiety and depression. Therefore, the relationship between worry, procrastination, and dimensions of perfectionism was investigated in a sample of 180 students, while controlling for anxiety and depression. Results show that worry had substantial correlations with procrastination and perfectionism, particularly with perfectionist concern over mistakes and doubts. Moreover, worry was related to parental criticism and expectations, but unrelated to excessively high personal standards. Instead, high-worriers reported to lower standards under stress. Partial correlations indicated that these correlations were specific for amount of worry, thus differentiating amount of worry, pathological worry, anxiety, and depression.

This study explored the relationships between individuals' ability to tolerate emotional distress to their tendency to worry excessively, the amount of imagery they experience during worrying, and the concreteness of their worrisome thought. A group of 119 university students completed a thought-listing task recording their most severe current worry, estimated the amount of imagery and verbal thought during this worry episode, and completed questionnaires assessing their worry proneness, negative effect, and ability to tolerate emotional distress. The concreteness of thought-listed worry episodes was rated by independent judges. Consistent with expectations, lower distress tolerance was associated with more worrying, even when levels of negative affect were statistically controlled for. Excessive worriers also reported lower levels of imagery, but imagery and distress tolerance were unrelated. The findings concerning concreteness were in the opposite direction to those expected: more excessive worrying and lower distress tolerance were associated with more concreteness of worrisome thought. The results are consistent with avoidance theory, but future research is needed to investigate the mechanisms by which low distress tolerance may contribute to excessive worrying.

The phenomenon of 'Worried-Well' is a form of tendency of high worry and anxiety as a result of the development of a virus or disease. In more detail, individuals with 'Worried-Well' will tend to have a fear of everything, and assume that they have a disease or have medical problems, despite the fact that the individual is physically healthy. This phenomenon is not something rare, but quite difficult to identify. The existence of the COVID-19 pandemic has further increased the prevalence of the 'Worried-Well' phenomenon, due to the anxiety that is formed related to their health, disruption of mental health services, and the inability of the health care system to diagnose underlying psychosocial factors (Kini, et al., 2020). Individuals with 'Worried-Well' will tend to self-diagnose their anxiety about their illness, especially with the emphasis on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (MIST, 2020). If not treated immediately, it will have a greater impact on health, both physically and mentally. Therefore, researchers are interested in discussing in more detail the use of the EPPS personality profile as a form of early analysis of the 'Worried-Well' individual, so that interventions can be carried out quickly and precisely. This study was conducted using a literature review method that aims to determine the personality profile of individuals who can refer to the "Worried-Well" behavior through the EPPS personality test, and to detect individuals who have the potential to experience Worried-Well early.

Jews have been expert at coping with anxiety. Psychiatry, the branch of medicine concerned with phobia, chronic apprehension, and excessive worry, was born only when religion was losing its grip on intellectual society, in the mid-19th century. Since earliest times, it was religion that provided the framework for understanding and coping with fear and dread. In addition, while humour is not a product of religion, it is one of the intellectual weapons that Jews have sharpened for the age-old battle with anxiety.
of religion, it is one of the intellectual
weapons that Jews have sharpened for the
age-old battle with anxiety.

An adaptation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) [Meyer, T. J., Miller, M. L., Metzger, R. L. and Borkovec, T. D. (1990). Development and validation of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 28, 487–495.] for weekly assessment of worry was evaluated in a brief treatment study. Cognitive restructuring techniques were taught to 28 nonclinical high-worriers, 14 of whom served as a control group in a lagged waiting-list design. Results showed that the Penn State Worry Questionnaire-Past Week (PSWQ-PW) was highly reliable and substantially valid in the assessment of both (a) weekly status of worry and (b) treatment-related changes in worry: average Cronbach's alpha was 0.91; average convergent correlation with a past-week adaptation of the Worry Domains Questionnaire [Tallis, F., Eysenck, M. W. and Mathews, A. (1992). A questionnaire for the measurement of nonpathological worry. Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 161–168.] was 0.63 and pre-post improvement on PSWQ-PW showed a 0.71 correlation with the Questionnaire of Changes in Experiencing and Behavior [Zielke, M. and Kopf-Mehnert, C. (1978). Veränderungsfragebogen des Erlebens und Verhaltens. Weinheim, Germany: Beltz Test Gesellschaft.]. It is concluded that the PSWQ-PW is a useful instrument for monitoring pathological worry in experimental and applied settings.

Both lay concept and scientific theory have embraced the view that nonpathological worry may be helpful for defining and analyzing problems. To evaluate the quality of problem elaborations, concreteness is a key variable. Two studies with nonclinical student samples are presented in which participants elaborated topics associated with different degrees of worry. In Study 1, participants' elaborations were assessed using problem elaboration charts; in Study 2, they were assessed using catastrophizing interviews. When participants' problem elaborations were rated for concreteness, both studies showed an inverse relationship between degree of worry and concreteness: The more participants worried about a given topic the less concrete was the content of their elaboration. The results challenge the view that worry may promote better problem analyses. Instead they conform to the view that worry is a cognitive avoidance response.

Rumination is thought to be associated with chronically higher heart rate (HR) and chronically lower heart rate variability (HRV), each of which is independently associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease (Task Force Guidelines, 1996). Additionally, rumination is thought to be a mediator of the relationships of stress with higher HR and lower HRV. To examine these notions, an observational study was conducted. Participants endorsing a range of depressive symptom severities reported rumination on an hourly basis throughout a single day. Ambulatory HR and HRV readings were obtained both during the day and during the subsequent sleeping period. Consistent with expectations, daily rumination demonstrated associations with higher HR and lower HRV during waking. Notably, daily rumination demonstrated these associations over and above the effects of daily worry. Furthermore, daily rumination mediated the relationship between daily stress and waking HR and marginally mediated the relationship between daily stress and waking HRV. Of note, results failed to support predicted relationships of daily rumination with higher HR or lower HRV during sleeping. Taken together, findings are consistent with the notion that, by maintaining cognitive representations of previous stressors, rumination may lead to concurrently elevated cardiac activity .

This study investigated developmental differences in the relationship of probability and cost estimates to worrying. Adults, younger children (M age = 8.67 years) and older children (M age = 11.06 years) rated the extent to which they worry about a list of negative social and physical outcomes and provided subjective probability and cost estimates for the same outcomes. Adults reported worrying more about social outcomes and rated them as less ‘bad’ (or costly) but more likely to occur than physical outcomes. Unlike adults, children in both age groups reported worrying more about physical outcomes. However, similar to adults, they also rated social outcomes as less ‘bad’ but more likely to occur than physical outcomes. Regression analyses showed that probability ratings were the best predictors of worry in adults, both probability and cost ratings equally predicted worry in older children, but only cost ratings predicted worry in younger children.

Recent findings in different areas of psychology and cognitive science have brought the unconscious mind back to centre stage. However, the unconscious mind worry remains: What renders unconscious phenomena mental? I suggest a new strategy for answering this question, which rests on the idea that categorizing unconscious phenomena as “mental” should be scientifically useful relative to the explanatory research goals. I argue that this is the case if by categorizing an unconscious phenomenon as “mental” one picks out explanatorily relevant similarities to a corresponding paradigmatically mental conscious phenomenon. Explanatory relevance is spelled out in terms of mechanistic norms.

The COVIDiSTRESS global survey collects data on early human responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic from 173 429 respondents in 48 countries. The open science study was co-designed by an international consortium of researchers to investigate how psychological responses differ across countries and cultures, and how this has impacted behaviour, coping and trust in government efforts to slow the spread of the virus. Starting in March 2020, COVIDiSTRESS leveraged the convenience of unpaid online recruitment to generate public data. The objective of the present analysis is to understand relationships between psychological responses in the early months of global coronavirus restrictions and help understand how different government measures succeed or fail in changing public behaviour. There were variations between and within countries. Although Western Europeans registered as more concerned over COVID-19, more stressed, and having slightly more trust in the governments' efforts, there...