Repetitive Negative Thinking Explains the Relationship Between Perceived Attentional Control and Generalized Anxiety Symptoms

Background: Attentional control deficits are present across several diagnostic categories and often predict severe depression and anxiety in longitudinal research. The impaired disengagement hypothesis, which suggests that poor attentional control predicts more frequent repetitive negative thinking, thereby promoting depression, serves as a critical foundation in the attentional control literature by proposing why poor attentional control and psychopathology symptoms relate. The current study proposed that repetitive negative thinking would explain the relationship between poor attentional control and generalized anxiety symptoms. Method: Participants included undergraduate students ( n = 370) and individuals enrolled at an anxiety treatment clinic ( n = 223). We directed the participants to respond to and read an informed consent document, a demographics questionnaire, several measures of psychopathology symptoms and mechanisms, and a debriefing form. Results: The results suggest that repetitive negative thinking explains the relationship between perceived attentional control and generalized anxiety symptoms in the undergraduate sample, but not the clinical sample. The results of the best-fitting models suggest that the relationship between perceived attentional control and anxiety symptoms is more complex, nuanced, and different in a clinical sample. Conclusion: These findings support the impaired disengagement hypothesis for anxiety in an undergraduate sample, but more research may clarify why the data in the current study did not support the impaired disengagement hypothesis for anxiety in a clinical sample and to further explore the unique relationships found in the clinical model.