Anxiety, Worry, and Difficulty Concentrating: A Longitudinal Examination of Concurrent and Prospective Symptom Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Worry was associated with difficulty concentrating across three pandemic timepoints. • Anxiety predicted worry three months later, controlling for concurrent worry. • Worry partially mediated the path from T1 anxiety to T3 difficulty concentrating. • Mediation was not robust to controlling for outcomes at previous timepoints. Difficulty concentrating is an understudied cognitive phenomenon, despite its status as a diagnostic criterion for generalized anxiety disorder and contributor to clinically significant distress and impairment. Worry may constitute a cognitive mechanism by which anxiety leads to difficulty concentrating. The present study examined concurrent and prospective associations between self-reported anxiety, worry, and subjective difficulty concentrating across three timepoints (T1 April/May, T2 July/August, T3 October/November 2020) in 198 adults ( M age = 37.94, SD = 13.42; 81% women, 2% gender minority) drawn from a larger study of trajectories of psychopathology during the COVID-19 pandemic. In multilevel models, anxiety was associated with worry both between ( β = 0.65, SE = 0.13) and within participants ( β = 0.12, SE = 0.11). Difficulty concentrating was also associated with worry between ( β = 0.38, SE = 0.03) and within participants ( β = 0.09, SE = 0.02). In a structural equation model , worry partially mediated the longitudinal association between anxiety and difficulty concentrating, though this effect was nonsignificant after controlling for difficulty concentrating at T2 and worry, depression, sleep disturbance, and difficulty concentrating at T1. The unadjusted mediation and these other findings are in line with theoretical accounts of worry as a cognitive mechanism linking anxiety to subjective attentional problems .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".