Do beliefs about your own worrying predict relationship problems?
Students' beliefs about their own thinking, especially that worry is uncontrollable and dangerous, predicted how many interpersonal problems they reported even after accounting for mood, attachment style and personality.
Source
Metacognitive Beliefs Uniquely Contribute to Interpersonal Problems: A Test Controlling for Adult Attachment, Big-5 Personality Traits, Anxiety, and Depression
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single questionnaire session analysed with a pre-specified five-step hierarchical regression (demographics, anxiety/depression, attachment, Big Five, then metacognitive beliefs) predicting interpersonal problems.
- N
- N=296 · 296 Norwegian undergraduate psychology students recruited at a lecture (77.7% female).
- Population
- Norwegian undergraduate psychology students, mean age 22.35 years
- Outcome
- Global interpersonal problems (Inventory of Interpersonal Problems, 48-item version), predicted from metacognitive beliefs (MCQ-30), anxiety and depression (HSCL-25), adult attachment (MAQ) and Big Five traits (NEO-PI-R)
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers gave 296 Norwegian psychology undergraduates a set of questionnaires measuring interpersonal problems, anxiety and depression, adult attachment styles, the Big Five personality traits, and five kinds of metacognitive beliefs (for example, that worry is helpful, or that it is uncontrollable and dangerous). They entered these predictors in a fixed order in a hierarchical regression to see whether metacognitive beliefs added explanatory power beyond everything else.
What they found
Interpersonal problems correlated with anxiety, depression, insecure attachment, neuroticism and every metacognitive belief scale, most strongly with beliefs that worry is uncontrollable and dangerous (r = 0.515). Anxiety and depression explained 23.6% of the variance, attachment another 11.7% and personality another 4.2%; metacognitive beliefs, entered last, still added 7.9%. In the final model, negative beliefs about worry were the strongest unique predictor, and neuroticism no longer predicted interpersonal problems once metacognitions were included.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The data come from one time point, so they cannot show that metacognitive beliefs cause interpersonal problems rather than the reverse. The sample was a convenience group of mostly female psychology students, not patients, and everything was self-reported. Some scales had poor reliability (the ambivalence-merger attachment scale had an alpha of 0.27), and the paper is inconsistent about which metacognition subscales were significant in the final model: the Results name negative beliefs and cognitive confidence, while the Discussion also lists positive beliefs and cognitive self-consciousness.
Key terms
- Metacognitive beliefs
- Beliefs about one's own thinking, such as 'worrying helps me cope' (positive) or 'my worrying is uncontrollable and dangerous' (negative).
- Cognitive attentional syndrome (CAS)
- In Wells' metacognitive model, a pattern of worry, rumination, threat monitoring and unhelpful coping that maintains psychological distress.
- Interpersonal problems
- Recurring difficulties in relationships, such as being too controlling, too cold, socially avoidant or too easily exploited.
- Hierarchical regression
- A regression in which blocks of predictors are entered in a set order so you can see how much extra variance each block explains beyond the earlier ones.
- Incremental (unique) variance
- The additional variance in an outcome explained by a predictor after other predictors are already accounted for.
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Quiz yourself
Which block of predictors was entered last in the regression?
Common questions
Why enter metacognitive beliefs last in the regression?
Putting them last is a conservative test: they only get credit for variance that anxiety, depression, attachment and personality could not already explain.
Does this mean metacognitive therapy would fix relationship problems?
It is consistent with that idea, and the authors cite therapy studies where interpersonal problems improved, but this correlational student study cannot test it.
Why did avoidant attachment still predict interpersonal problems?
Partly perhaps for a trivial reason: the avoidant attachment items are worded very like the interpersonal-problem items, so the overlap may reflect shared content rather than a real psychological link.
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