The emotional experience associated with worrying: anxiety, depression, or stress?

Avoidance theories propose that worrying results in a reduction of the physiological arousal symptoms of anxiety. However, relatively little is known about the emotional symptoms that remain associated with worrying. This study explored whether the emotional states of anxiety, depression, or stress are specifically associated with excessive and uncontrollable worry. A group of 126 university students were selected to represent a wide range on the dimension of worry proneness. They completed a worry questionnaire, monitored the frequency and uncontrollability of their worry episodes for 1 week, and completed the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS) to indicate their level of negative affect during the monitoring period. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that all measures of worrying had a unique positive association with stress, over and above their associations with anxiety and depression. Item-level analyses showed that stress symptoms were uniformly strongly associated with worrying, while anxiety symptoms had the weakest associations. These results increase our knowledge regarding the phenomenology of worrying and underline the potential theoretical significance of the emotional state assessed by the DASS Stress scale. This scale fills the current need for a psychometrically sound instrument to assess the emotional experience associated with worrying.