ArticleCognitive therapy and research2022
What's Worrying Our Students? Increasing Worry Levels over Two Decades and a New Measure of Student Worry Frequency and Domains.
Article in Cognitive therapy and research, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- A 14-week structured breathing program: an investigation into its impact on psychological health parameters in university students.BMC public health · 2025Trial
- Perceived Causes of Sleep Problems in Higher Education Students: An Exploratory Study.Psychological reports · 2026Article
- Language of Perseverative Thoughts Predicts Emotion Regulation Strategy Choice.Affective science · 2026Article
- The dual structure of anxiety: reconciling general and specific approaches.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Anxiety and depression in emerging adults: The STAND program as a model of scalable screening and intervention.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- The Role of Rumination and Worry in the Bidirectional Relationship Between Stress and Sleep Quality in Students.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Article
- Specific Pandemic-Related Worries Predict Higher Attention-Related Errors and Negative Affect Independent of Trait Anxiety in UK-Based Students.Cognitive therapy and research · 2023Article
- Evaluation of the effectiveness of sleep hygiene education and FITBIT devices on quality of sleep and psychological worry: a pilot quasi-experimental study among first-year college students.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Impact of a Brief Biofeedback Intervention on Nursing Students' Worry and Resilience.Nursing education perspectivesArticle
- Should we worry about how we measure worry? Insights from an updated version of the Italian Penn State Worry Questionnaire.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundThe frequency and severity of mental health problems in student populations have been a growing cause for concern worldwide, and studies have identified measures of a number of mental health symptoms that have been steadily increasing in frequency and intensity over the past 20-25 years.
methodsIn two studies we investigate the levels and domains of pathological worrying in university student participants. Study 1 is a retrospective study of Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) data collected between 2001 and 2019. Study 2 describes the development of the Student Worry Questionnaire, a short and easily delivered measure of student worrying that identifies both frequency of worry as well as the student-relevant domains across which worrying occurs.
resultsStudy 1 revealed a steady increase in student worry scores of around 20% between 2001 and 2019, with a significant positive correlation between year of data collection and mean PSWQ score. The domain scores in Study 2 indicated that academic work was a significantly higher worry than any of the other domains, and worries about intimate relationships and 'what people think of me' were also worries that scored higher than either financial or health worries.
conclusionsThe present studies indicate that pathological worrying can be added to the list of anxiety- and stress-related symptoms that have been shown to be on the increase in student populations in recent decades, and we discuss whether these increases represent a greater willingness to report symptoms or a genuine increase in experienced symptoms over time.
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