Trial reportJournal of affective disorders2018
Worry amplifies theory-of-mind reasoning for negatively valenced social stimuli in generalized anxiety disorder.
Trial report in Journal of affective disorders, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Dampening of positive affect as an emotional contrast avoidance strategy: An experimental test of the contrast avoidance model.Behaviour research and therapy · 2026Trial
- Is a brief mindfulness ecological momentary intervention more efficacious than a self-monitoring app for social anxiety disorder? A randomized controlled trial.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2024Trial
- Examining the Effects of a Brief, Fully Self-Guided Mindfulness Ecological Momentary Intervention on Empathy and Theory-of-Mind for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR mental health · 2024Trial
- Testing the Efficacy of a Brief, Self-Guided Mindfulness Ecological Momentary Intervention on Emotion Regulation and Self-Compassion in Social Anxiety Disorder: Randomized Controlled Trial.JMIR mental health · 2024Trial
- Penny for your thoughts: A review and proposed model of socioeconomic status, working memory and worry.The British journal of developmental psychology · 2026Review
- The impact of state and trait general and social anxiety on theory of mind.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Neuropsychiatric symptoms and social cognition in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease.Dementia & neuropsychologia · 2026Article
- Theory of mind and impulsivity mediate the relationship between anxiety and non-suicidal self-injury in adolescents with depressive disorder.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Sex Differences in the Association Between Difficulties with Worry Regulation and Anxiety Symptoms in Black Children.Journal of child and family studies · 2025Article
- The Influence of Temperament, Theory of Mind, Inhibitory Control, and Prosocial Behavior on Child Anxiety Symptoms in the First Five Years of Life.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Article
- Elevated depression and anxiety predict future patterns of individualistic and collectivistic cultural values: A cross-lagged longitudinal network analysis.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Article
- Unlocking the Emotional World of Visual Media: An Overview of the Science, Research, and Impact of Understanding Emotion: Drawing Insights From Psychology, Engineering, and the Arts, This Article Provides a Comprehensive Overview of the Field of Emotion Analysis in Visual Media and Discusses the Latest Research, Systems, Challenges, Ethical Implications, and Potential Impact of Artificial Emotional Intelligence on Society.Proceedings of the IEEE. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers · 2023Article
- Performance in emotion recognition and theory of mind tasks in social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Review
- Psychotherapeutic treatments for generalized anxiety disorder: cognitive and behavioral therapies, enhancement strategies, and emerging efforts.Expert review of neurotherapeutics · 2022Review
- Curiosity helps: Growth in need for cognition bidirectionally predicts future reduction in anxiety and depression symptoms across 10 years.Journal of affective disorders · 2022Article
- Individuals' marital instability mediates the association of their perceived childhood parental affection predicting adulthood depression across 18 years.Journal of affective disorders · 2021Article
- Pediatric anxiety associated with altered facial emotion recognition.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2021Article
- Reading the Mind in the Eyes: A Population-Based Study of Social Cognition in Older Adults.The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry · 2021Article
- Depression and Psychological-Behavioral Responses Among the General Public in China During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Survey Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Article
- Self- and other-perceptions of interpersonal problems: Effects of generalized anxiety, social anxiety, and depression.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundTheory-of-mind (ToM) is the ability to accurately infer others' thoughts and feelings. In generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), cognitive and emotion regulation theories allude to the plausibility that ToM is conditional on the degree of individuals' state worry, a hallmark symptom. GAD and state worry may interact to predict ToM constructs. However, no experiments have directly tested such interactional hypotheses, and used ToM as a framework to advance understanding of social cognition in GAD. This study therefore aimed to address this gap.
methods171 participants (69 GAD, 102 Controls) were randomly assigned to either a Worry or Relaxation induction and completed well-validated ToM decoding (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test) and reasoning (Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition) tasks.
resultsGAD status significantly interacted with state worry to predict accuracy of overall reasoning, cognitive-reasoning, positive-reasoning, and negative-reasoning ToM. Worry, as opposed to relaxation, led sufferers of GAD to display more accurate overall reasoning and cognitive-reasoning ToM than controls, especially for negative signals. Participants with GAD who worried, but not relaxed, were also significantly better than the norm at interpreting negative signals. These findings remained after controlling for gender, executive function, social anxiety, and depressive symptoms. For other ToM abilities, mean scores of persons with and without GAD who either worried or relaxed were normative. LIMITATIONS: The ToM reasoning measure lacked self-reference, and these preliminary findings warrant replication.
conclusionsTheoretical implications, such as the state worry-contingent nature of ToM in GAD, and clinical implications are discussed.
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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.