The Fixed Mindset of Anxiety Predicts Future Distress: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Mindsets, or beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes such as intelligence and personality, have been linked to a wide range of outcomes in educational and social psychology. There has been recent interest in exploring this construct in clinical psychological contexts. To that end, research has shown that the fixed mindset of anxiety—the belief that anxiety is fixed and unchangeable—is related to a variety of psychological distress symptoms, emotion regulation strategies, and treatment preferences. One outstanding question is whether the fixed mindset of anxiety predicts future psychological symptoms. To address this question, the current longitudinal study assessed weekly distress and anxiety mindset across 5 weeks. We found that fixed mindset of anxiety is predictive of future weekly distress, even after controlling for the previous week’s distress, sex, socioeconomic status, baseline depression symptoms, and presence of psychiatric diagnosis. These findings add evidence to an emerging conceptual framework in which the fixed mindset of anxiety represents an important risk factor for the onset of future psychological problems.