Research paperA longitudinal trait-state model of attentional control: Implications for repetitive negative thinking
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 1279 participants completed at least one survey as part of the present study. Participants were excluded from analyses if they scored more than two standard deviations above the sample mean on the Lie Scale (see Measures), leaving 1251 participants (87% female, 13% male, 0.2% declined to respond) with complete, valid data from at least one wave of the study. The mean age of the participants was 42.6 years (SD = 13.6 years), ranging from 18 to 71 years. The ethnicity composition was
Descriptive statistics and correlations
Means, standard deviations, and cross-wave correlations for the ACS Focusing and Shifting subscales, as well as measures of repetitive negative thinking, appear in Table 1. As expected, correlations between waves generally decreased as the lag between waves increased from one month to five months. Median over-time correlations for ACS Focusing were 0.83 for lag 1, 0.81 for lag 2, 0.79 for lag 3, 0.79 for lag 4, and 0.76 for lag 5. For ACS Shifting, median over-time correlations were 0.73 for
Discussion
Attentional control has been described as a trait that may have its effects on affective disorders by facilitating negative repetitive thinking (De Jong et al., 2019). Although preliminary evidence suggests that attentional control is stable over time (Booth et al., 2019), very little research has examined its longitudinal structure. In the current study, the trait-state model was applied to longitudinal data from an adult community sample that completed the ACS, the most commonly used measure
Authors contributions
Bunmi Olatunji was the coordinating investigator on the study. All authors contributed to the concept and design of the study. Bunmi Olatunji and Kelly Knowles contributed to data collection. Kelly Knowles and David Cole undertook the data analysis. All authors contributed to the critical interpretation of the data, drafting and revising the manuscript, and approved the final article for submission.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors have no conflict of interest to declare.
Role of funding source
None.
Acknowledgments
None.
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