How Does Increased Worry Affect Worries About Unrelated Issues?

There are two competing accounts explaining how increased worry about one issue affects people’s worry about unrelated issues. According to one account, it decreases worries about other issues, reflecting a negative cross-effect consistent with the finite pool of worry hypothesis. In the second account, it increases worry, reflecting a positive cross-effect driven by generalized affect and availability heuristics. We conducted a web-based experiment on representative samples of adults in the Czech Republic and Poland (total N = 7,051). We manipulated worry about one of three societal issues and measured the effect of this manipulation on the degree of worry about 12 unrelated issues. We also examined the underlying mechanism by looking at whether the effect was mediated by affect (a mechanism related to generalized affect) and moderated by issue similarity (a mechanism related to availability heuristics). The study provides strong evidence for a positive but negligible cross-effect of worry on non-target worries (i.e., target worries increase non-target worries) that becomes somewhat larger, yet still small, for some target worries and when examined in each of the two countries separately. Further, there is strong evidence that this effect is mediated by generalized affect (specifically its valence; small effect size) and positively moderated by issue similarity (negligible effect size). These results support both hypothesized mechanisms of positive cross effects, namely that these are driven by generalized affect and availability heuristics. Our result contributes to a better understanding of how increased worry affects worries about other issues.