A control-process perspective on anxiety

Abstract

A view of certain consequences of anxiety is presented in which anxiety causes an interruption in ongoing self-regulation, leading to an assessment of outcome or coping expectancy. In this theory, people with favorable expectancies return to the interrupted activity, whereas people with unfavorable expectancies experience an impulse to disengage from further efforts. Our view differs from other attentional theories of anxiety in the following way: we argue, with the support of research evidence, that both the renewed effort and the disengagement (and its consequent performance impairment) are exaggerated by subsequent self-focused attention.