Preocupação: aspectos psicobiológicos, psicométricos e sua relação com variáveis cognitivas e comportamentais

Abstract

Worry is defined as a chain of predominantly verbal thoughts, whose contents are about future events with some degree of uncertainty. At an atypical level, concerns become persistent, pervasive, uncontrollable, and are associated with distress and functional impairment. There is a scarcity of measures that assess this construct, as well as the need for more evidence on the relationship between worry and other behavioral and cognitive variables. In order to expand the body of evidence on the phenomenon of worry, based on four articles that make up the thesis, this research aimed to review the role of worry from the Tinbergen’s four questions (Study I), to develop and investigate the properties psychometric measurements of an inventory to assess worries (Study II), to explore the structural dynamics of worry based on network analysis (Study III), to verify the relationship between worry, unpredictability beliefs, neuroticism and uncertainty intolerance (Study IV), and to analyze the role of worry and sleep complaints in cognitive failures (Study V). Study I showed that the application of the four levels of explanation of behavior (e.g., mechanisms, ontogeny, adaptive function, and phylogeny) allows a multifaceted understanding of worry. In Study II, the Worry Assessment Inventory (WAI) was developed, consisting of 21 items based on content validity. The two-factor model provided the best fit and plausibility for the WAI. Evidence on concurrent and convergent validity, measure invariance for gender, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability was provided. The Study III verified that the worry network is multifaceted and varied, with everyday functional impairment related to worrying being the most prominent and influential element. In Study IV, results indicated that higher unpredictability beliefs about self, people, and the world predicted more intolerance of uncertainty and worry mediated by neuroticism traits. Intolerance of uncertainty mediated the effect of neuroticism on worry. Regarding Study V, it was found that worry leads to more cognitive failures. Worry and sleep problems correlated strongly. Sleep problems did not have a significant effect on cognitive failures at a latent level. In general, the set of studies presented here offers a new measure of worry and expands and provides new evidence on worry and how this construct relates to other behavioral and cognitive variables.