Metacognition
Do beliefs about your own worrying predict relationship problems?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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)
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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