gms | German Medical Science

Background: Pathological worries are core symptoms in many mental disorders. Worry binds cognitive resources, reduces performance and attentional control, and impacts negatively on information processing. It is unclear whether this rule applies to across different levels of worrying, from normal to pathological worry (as in Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Preliminary results of a newly conducted experiment show that there is a general stress reaction in anxiety patients and healthy controls as show in decreased cognitive performance, which may lead to problems when the patients return to work.

Aim: The present research extends these findings by examining how GAD patients and other clinical populations in a inpatient setting perform in worry-free compared to worry-laden situations in a working memory (WM) task.

Method: 94 patients with various mental disorders performed a numerical work memory task. The task consisted of two trials, with a worry induction between the trials. Worries, anxiety and repetitive negative thoughts were assessed during the test.

Results/findings: Two data analytic approaches are pursued: First, accuracy and response time differences between before and after worry induction are compared. Second, the patients are divided into different groups depending on the disorder. It is examined whether there are differences in the accuracy and the reaction time between the groups.

Discussion and conclusions: Previous research focused on pathological worries and their impact on cognitive performance, where the majority of studies used non-clinical subjects. This is one of the first studies to examine the impact of different worry intensities on WM performance before and after a worry induction in clinical inpatients. The implications of reduced cognitive capacities during worry on therapy- and workplace related tasks for which high cognitive resources are needed will be discussed.