Articulated thoughts, irrational beliefs, and fear of negative evaluation

Abstract

Contemporary cognitive behavioral theories of psychopathology and therapy assume that people's emotional and behavioral problems are influenced by particular patterns of thought. And yet there is little direct evidence in support of this widespread belief. An experiment is reported that examined the thoughts of people high or low on measures of social-evaluative anxiety and of the tendency to think irrationally. Subjects' cognition was studied under controlled laboratory conditions in the “articulated thoughts during simulated situations” paradigm, in which the subject role-played an audiotaped interpersonal encounter and, at predetermined points, verbalized thoughts elicited by a short segment of the fictitious event. Several findings emerged: Subjects thought less rationally when confronted with stressful situations than with a nonstressful one; subjects high on questionnaire-defined fear of negative evaluation and irrational thinking rated stressful tapes as more anxietyprovoking than did subjects low on these inventories; for highly fearful and irrational subjects, self-reported global anxiety elicited by stressful tapes correlated significantly with irrationality detected in their articulated thoughts. Irrational thinking as measured by articulated thoughts, however, did not correlate with inventories that are expected to predict irrationality in specific situations.