Browsing by Author "Naragon-Gainey, Kristin"

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    Anxiety, worry, and difficulty concentrating: A longitudinal examination of concurrent and prospective symptom relationships
    Blendermann, Mary; Breaux, Rosanna; Fried, Eiko I.; Naragon-Gainey, Kristin; Starr, Lisa R.; Stewart, Jeremy; Teachman, Bethany A. (Elsevier, 2025-01)
    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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    Intolerance of uncertainty as a predictor of anxiety severity and trajectory during the COVID-19 pandemic
    Breaux, Rosanna; Naragon-Gainey, Kristin; Katz, Benjamin; Starr, Lisa; Stewart, Jeremy; Teachman, Bethany; Burkhouse, Katie; Caulfield, M. Kathleen; Cha, Christine; Cooper, Samuel; Dalmaijer, Edwin; Kriegshauser, Katie; Kusmierski, Susan; Ladouceur, Cecile; Asmundson, Gordon; Davis Goodwine, Darlene; Fried, Eiko; Gratch, Ilana; Kendall, Philip; Lissek, Shmuel; Manbeck, Adrienne; McFayden, Tyler; Price, Rebecca; Roecklein, Kathryn; Wright, Aidan; Yovel, Iftah; Hallion, Lauren (Pergamon-Elsevier, 2024-08-03)
    Background: Efforts to identify risk and resilience factors for anxiety severity and course during the COVID-19 pandemic have focused primarily on demographic rather than psychological variables. Intolerance of uncertainty (IU), a transdiagnostic risk factor for anxiety, may be a particularly relevant vulnerability factor. Method: N = 641 adults with pre-pandemic anxiety data reported their anxiety, IU, and other pandemic and mental health-related variables at least once and up to four times during the COVID-19 pandemic, with assessments beginning in May 2020 through March 2021. Results: In preregistered analyses using latent growth models, higher IU at the first pandemic timepoint predicted more severe anxiety, but also a sharper decline in anxiety, across timepoints. This finding was robust to the addition of pre-pandemic anxiety and demographic predictors as covariates (in the full sample) as well as pre-pandemic depression severity (in participants for whom pre-pandemic depression data were available). Younger age, lower self/parent education, and self-reported history of COVID-19 illness at the first pandemic timepoint predicted more severe anxiety across timepoints with strong model fit, but did not predict anxiety trajectory. Conclusions: IU prospectively predicted more severe anxiety but a sharper decrease in anxiety over time during the pandemic, including after adjustment for covariates. IU therefore appears to have unique and specific predictive utility with respect to anxiety in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.