ArticleBehaviour research and therapy2012
A cognitive model of pathological worry.
Article in Behaviour research and therapy, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 118 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
118 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Neural correlates of implicit emotion regulation in mood and anxiety disorders: an fMRI meta-analytic review.Scientific reports · 2025Pooled it
- A Cognitive Model of Pathological Worry in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2020Pooled it
- Pooled it
- Rumination and postnatal depression: A systematic review and a cognitive model.Behaviour research and therapy · 2016Pooled it
- The 'FRIENDS for Life' emotional health programme: Differential impact for those at risk.The British journal of educational psychology · 2026Trial
- Neurocognitive predictors of adherence to an online pain self-management program adjunct to long-term opioid therapy.Journal of clinical and experimental neuropsychology · 2023Trial
- Impaired disengagement from worry: Dissociating the impacts of valence and internally-directed attention.Behaviour research and therapy · 2023Trial
- Emotional working memory training reduces rumination and alters the EEG microstate in anxious individuals.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2020Trial
- Protracted amygdalar response predicts efficacy of a computer-based intervention targeting attentional patterns in transdiagnostic clinical anxiety.Translational psychiatry · 2019Trial
- A relationship between weak attentional control and cognitive distortions, explained by negative affect.PloS one · 2019Trial
- I'm going to fail! Acute cognitive performance anxiety increases threat-interference and impairs WM performance.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Worry amplifies theory-of-mind reasoning for negatively valenced social stimuli in generalized anxiety disorder.Journal of affective disorders · 2018Trial
- Trial
- The power of positive thinking: Pathological worry is reduced by thought replacement in Generalized Anxiety Disorder.Behaviour research and therapy · 2016Trial
- Trial
- Verbal worry facilitates attention to threat in high-worriers.Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry · 2014Trial
- Mental health and somatic symptom reductions during Ukraine's counteroffensive in the fall of 2023.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Negative interpretation bias and repetitive negative thinking as mechanisms in the association between insomnia and depression in young adults.The British journal of clinical psychology · 2026Article
- Network reorganization of gaming disorder, depression, and anxiety across the transition to emerging adulthood: a longitudinal symptom-level analysis.BMC psychiatry · 2026Article
- Symptom-specific intervention targets for depression and anxiety among older adults by physical multimorbidity patterns: a simulation-based network analysis.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2026Article
58 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We present an evidence-based model of pathological worry in which worry arises from an interaction between involuntary (bottom-up) processes, such as habitual biases in attention and interpretation favouring threat content, and voluntary (top-down) processes, such as attentional control. At a pre-conscious level, these processes influence the competition between mental representations when some correspond to the intended focus of attention and others to threat distracters. Processing biases influence the probability of threat representations initially intruding into awareness as negative thoughts. Worry in predominantly verbal form then develops, influenced by conscious processes such as attempts to resolve the perceived threat and the redirection of attentional control resources to worry content, as well as the continuing influence of habitual processing biases. After describing this model, we present evidence for each component process and for their causal role in pathological worry, together with implications for new directions in the treatment of pathological worry.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.