INFORMATION-PROCESSING, STORAGE CHARACTERISTICS AND WORRY

Eysenck (1984, Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 22, 545-548) sugge sted that storage characteristics may be an important determinant of w orry,and postulated that prolonged worry occurs in individuals who hav e tightly organised clusters of worry-related information stored in lo ng-term memory. These clusters reflect areas or domains of worry. Beca use the information is stored in fight clusters, it becomes more acces sible, more rapidly activated and therefore retrieved more quickly. Th e Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ) (Tallis, 1991c) is used to determi ne which domain worried subjects most (Primary) and least (Secondary). Two experiments are reported using a word allocation task, which requ ires subjects to make categorical decisions, based on these worry doma ins. It is reported that priming facilitates the emergence of domain e ffects, thus providing support for a structural hypothesis. High worri ers take longer to reject negative words if they are from the Primary domain and have difficulty rejecting Primary domain words when they ar e under a congruent heading. In addition, high worriers are reported t o show retarded latencies when attempting to process ambiguous informa tion, consistent with Metzger er al.'s studies (1990, Journal of Clini cal Psychology, 48, 76-88). It is suggested that the initiation and ma intenance of worry is largely attributable to an elevated evidence req uirement and this may link to the personality trait of perfectionism. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.