Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
If a student is supposed to write an essay she might feel uncomfortable, might feel unable to start or finish it, and might postpone or avoid the task, depending on how much she doubts her competence to attain the goal that is at stake. Self-doubts are worries about specific coping capabilities in a self-regulatory process. They have a detrimental motivational effect that adds to the reduced information processing efficiency characteristic for anxious individuals.
The present chapter makes an attempt to unite various lines of research. First, the cognitive anxiety component, "worry," that has been studied in clinical and in educational settings without much communication between the two, is examined. Second, the construct of self-doubts is introduced to overcome the unresolved issue of how anxiety (or worry) is theoretically related to perceived self-efficacy. Third, a motivational and volitional perspective is chosen to model the way individuals adopt, initiate, and maintain difficult actions. Behavioral change, including coping with stress, is seen as a multistage process that is guided by different cognitions at different stages, but that is also impaired by worries or self-doubts at different stages. Self-doubts interfere with thought control of action.
The first section will briefly introduce the underlying action control model, the second will elaborate on intrusive thoughts, and the third will deal with an integration of such worries into the self-regulatory goal attainment approach.
Behavioral change is required when old behavioral routines become inefficient to serve their purposes or when they become incompatible with new goals. Imagine a student who decides to write a paper on a difficult topic. The decision-making includes a number of cognitive processes that can be described in terms of different psychological theories. From a transactional stress and emotion theory view (Lazarus, 1991), the student appraises a demanding academic situation that may tax or exceed his coping resources. Depending on the characteristics of the situation, failing on that task might be threatening because others would believe that he might be incompetent. On the other hand, the task is challenging because success might earn great pride or an attractive scholarship. This "demand appraisal" (What is at stake?) occurs at about the same moment as the corresponding "resource appraisal," i.e., the student scrutinizes his coping resources (What are my options?), such as academic ability, specific knowledge, time and equipment available, and social support. The degree to which he comes up with an overall appraisal of either challenge or threat is, however, largely determined by the existence and operation of self-doubts. The decision to invest effort, time, and other resources in this academic enterprise relies heavily on the confidence in the ability to perform the critical action successfully. Ruminative self-doubts undermine this belief and may cause the decision to write the paper to be postponed or dismissed entirely.
The decision-making is merely the beginning of a more comprehensive process that includes the planning and preparation of the task, the early attempts at writing the paper, the actual performance, and the difficulties in maintaining it while setbacks occur and other goals distract from the task.
In the stress theory of Lazarus, this is equivalent to coping in conjunction with multiple reappraisals while the unfolding person-environment encounter is monitored and evaluated. Reappraisals are potential sources of renewed self-doubts that impair the action and might lead to abandoning the goal in favor of other commitments. As in a cybernetic system, feedback occurs continuously at multiple points in time, each giving rise to either self-doubts or reassurance that, in turn, may stimulate either disengagement or investment of further efforts.
This stress theoretical perspective endorses the crucial role of cognitions before and during a coping process, but due to its diffuse and complex nature it is less suitable to identify persons at transition points that mark the end of one stage and the beginning of another. In particular, when it comes to study the adoption, initiation, or maintenance of a novel behavior, an action theoretical perspective appears to be more suitable to address debilitating cognitions that prevent the transition from one stage to another. In particular, health behaviors such as dieting, exercising, or quitting smoking can serve as examples for different coping behaviors that go beyond those already practiced actions that require only small amounts of effort instead of an elaborated adoption process.
An action-oriented model is proposed that consists of two stages. According to German action theorists (Gollwitzer, 1993; Heckhausen, 1991; Kuhl & Beckmann, 1994), a motivational process can be distinguished from a volitional process. To put it simply, the former includes the contemplation of alternatives and ends with an intention to act. The latter includes a planning and initiation stage where individuals elaborate on the means to conduct the behavior and an action stage where the intended behavior is performed and monitored. These stages could be further subdivided in order to study them in more detail.
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Such a stage model addresses unresolved issues that plagued former theories, such as the Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1988), or Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983) (see Schwarzer, 1992, for a critical review). In the next section, intrusive thoughts are discussed, and later on this model is described in more detail, pointing to the crucial role of self-doubts.
We all experience self-doubts occasionally and worry about our accomplishments, ruminate about self-worth, and have intrusive thoughts while facing a demanding task. Self-doubts are not only unpleasant in themselves, they also interfere with actions and can persist quite a while. Different authors use the vocabulary differently, and therefore these terms need to be defined for the present chapter. Rumination is defined as the occurrence of repetitive, intrusive, conscious, and aversive thoughts (Martin, Tesser, & McIntosh, 1993). They are unwanted and they interfere with normal functioning. The content of these intrusive thoughts can be everything that is negative, such as the loss of a loved one, an upcoming surgery, failure at an exam, or peer rejection. Worry has the same nature as ruminations, but it is usually less severe or less pathological. It includes concerns about decisions, about one's ability, and one's impression upon others. Usually, worry impairs optimal functioning. For example, one worries about one's social relationships and cannot fall asleep, or one worries about an exam and cannot study. There is no clear border between worrying and rumination - it is rather a semantic notion of matters of degree. It is questionable whether one should make a distinction here at all.
Worry and cognitive interference have been mentioned early in anxiety research (Mandler & Sarason, 1952; Sarason, 1960). Studies on this issue have been conducted more systematically in the last two decades. There are two major lines of research on worry in psychology, one in the field of test anxiety and the other in the field of clinical research. There was almost no communication between these research groups until the recent integrative work by Eysenck (1992). Clinical research on worry became prominent in the early 1980s. Borkovec, Robinson, Pruzinsky, and DePree (1983, p. 9) defined worry as "a chain of thoughts and images, negatively affect-laden and relatively uncontrollable. The worry process represents an attempt to engage in mental problem solving on an issue whose outcome is uncertain but contains the possibility of one or more negative outcomes. Consequently, worry relates closely to fear process." They found a correlation of .67 between the time spent on worrying and the trait of anxiety (see also Borkovec, 1985; Eysenck, 1984; Tallis, Eysenck, & Mathews, 1991). Worry was found to be prevalent in different kinds of patients, in particular those with general anxiety disorder and insomniacs plagued by ruminations that prevent them from falling asleep (Martin et al., 1993; Roemer & Borkovec, 1993). Meanwhile, it is acknowledged that worry is the cardinal feature of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The latter is defined as the presence of excessive and unrealistic worry in at least two domains of life for at least six months (DSM-IIIR, 1987). Patients with other anxiety disorders, such as phobias, also worry, but they do so less than GAD patients. Partly by definition and partly by empirical evidence it can be concluded that worry represents the key characteristic in GAD as well as in trait anxiety. An example of psychometric instruments to assess individual differences in worry is the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (Meyer, Miller, Metzger, & Borkovec, 1990). It contains rather general items such as "I have been a worrier all my life" or "My worries overwhelm me." GAD patients scored much higher than normals on this scale. The measure was highly correlated with trait anxiety (.64), but less so with depression (.36). An attempt to identify diverse content areas of worry was made by Tallis, Eysenck, and Matthews (1992), who designed a 30-item Worry Domains Questionnaire (WDQ) that refers to ten life domains. In a principal components analysis, two more general dimensions emerged, a strong factor pertaining to worries about one's social-evaluative self-concept, and a weaker one pertaining to worries about physical threat to oneself and others.
In test anxiety research, an explicit distinction between worry and emotionality was made about 30 years ago by Liebert and Morris (1967). It became apparent that anxiety could be seen as being composed of these two factors and that worry was more closely related to performance than emotionality. Liebert and Morris (1967) developed the Worry-Emotionality-Questionnaire (WEQ), a brief measure designed for making this distinction at the state anxiety level. Spielberger later published the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI), a measure for these two components at the trait level (Spielberger, 1980). This 20-item measure was translated into many languages and has sparked the idea of separate anxiety components within the test anxiety scientific community (cf. the volumes by Hagtvet & Backer Johnsen, 1992; Sarason, 1980; Schwarzer, van der Ploeg, & Spielberger, 1982, 1987, 1989; Van der Ploeg, Schwarzer, & Spielberger, 1983, 1984, 1985). A more refined approach was introduced by Sarason (1984, 1986, 1991) who developed a 40-item inventory called Reactions-to-Tests (RTT) that was composed of four anxiety components, namely worry ("I wonder how other people are doing"), irrelevant thinking ("My mind wanders during tests"), tension ("I feel distressed and uneasy before tests"), and bodily reactions ("I get a headache before a test"). These were two cognitive and two emotional components, and even more detailed distinctions have been made following this model. Schwarzer and Quast (1985), for example, have identified seven facets of test anxiety. However, this could easily become a continuous process until every test item is regarded to represent one specific test anxiety component. Conceptually, two anxiety components may be sufficient to help understand the operating mechanisms of cognitive-emotional processes when individuals face threatening events. The introduction of the component "irrelevant thinking" by Sarason (1984) was innovative in that it aimed at the interfering effect of cognitions while trying to concentrate on a task. Sarason and Sarason (1987) have found very close associations between this component and their Cognitive Interference Questionnaire (CEQ). There is overwhelming evidence that the worry component is responsible for the inhibition of performance in anxious individuals. Three meta-analyses have found negative correlations of academic or physical performance with worry, more so than with emotionality (Hembree, 1988; Kleine, 1990; Seipp, 1990). However, the coefficients are only of moderate size and lie typically near r = -.21, depending on the population studied, the measures employed, and other circumstances involved. These correlations do not reflect the full picture of the achievement-debilitating effect because they do not include the actual cognitive processes and the compensating mechanisms that preclude a closer inspection of the impairing procedure. According to Eysenck (1992), worry mainly affects the "internal processing efficiency," and less so the "external performance effectiveness." The former pertains to what is going on in the mind when intrusive thoughts occur and distract from the task. The latter simply reflects the measurable outcome of a "black-box achievement process" which is additionally influenced by the input of one's resources such as time and effort to attain the desired goals. Worriers may invest more effort to compensate for their lack of concentration: They may study harder because they anticipate failure, and they may persist longer because they cannot afford to lose face by disengaging from an important task, which could result in peer rejection. The gap between "internal processing efficiency" and "external performance effectiveness" narrows if there is no opportunity to invest personal resources. For example, if all individuals, worriers and nonworriers, are suddenly confronted with a challenging or threatening task to be completed immediately, the differences in effort are expected to be smaller than in a situation where there is plenty of time to prepare for the demands. In the preparation or coping period, worriers choose to try harder and make up for their poor concentration by spending more time on the task. Thus, they may come up with the same or even better results than the nonworriers. Depending on the characteristics of such a coping period and on other circumstances, the correlations between anxiety and performance can become negative or positive, low or high. Nevertheless, in terms of information processing the worriers are at a disadvantage when it comes to accomplishing difficult tasks. On the other hand, they might gain momentum while others remain at an unconcerned stance towards the challenge.
Why do people worry? According to Borkovec and Lyons (1993) the focus on the verbal act of worrying helps to reduce undesired physiological arousal and threatening imagery. Worry can be understood as an attempt to control other unwanted experiences. It "represents a strategic conceptual avoidance response which suppresses the processing of emotional information and thereby guarantees the maintenance of anxiety disorder" (Borkovec & Lyonfields, 1993, p. 102). With conceptual avoidance response it is meant that worry cognitions are rather thoughts than images. Moreover, this response is being used strategically. Fearful imagery as well as unpleasant physiological arousal are suppressed by worrisome activities. It has been found, for example, that subjects who are confronted with phobic scenes suppress their heart rate response when focusing on worry thoughts (Borkovec & Lyonfields, 1993, p. 105). Unfortunately, the preclusion of an elaborate emotional processing impedes a successful reduction of the threat value. Worry is even reinforced and becomes chronic because most of the ambiguous events that are in mind never actually occur. Thus, worries are superstitiously negatively reinforced by the nonoccurrence of these seemingly dangerous events (Roemer & Borkovec, 1993). This self-reinforcing nature reveals why worry is maladaptive in the long run. The expression of worry precludes successful emotional processing, but choosing to suppress worry instead does not help because suppressed thoughts tend to remain in memory and can even be increased. Suppression may set the stage for obsession. Distraction is also inappropriate since worriers have a tendency to distract themselves with thoughts of other worrisome topics. Instead of expression, suppression, and distraction, it is suggested to employ relaxation techniques, guided imagery, decatastrophizing, and alternative chains of thoughts (Roemer & Borkovec, 1993).
According to Eysenck (1992, p. 114), there are at least three functions of worry: (a) an alarm function that initially lets dangerous information become consciously aware, (b) a prompt function that represents thoughts and images about threats in awareness, and (c) a preparation function that allows the individual to be ready for upcoming harm and to have the appropriate coping strategies available. People worry when an event is seen as aversive, likely, imminent, and resource demanding. The threat value of an event is characterized by these aspects, and with increasing threat value worry increases. Eysenck (1992, p. 115) underscores that not only subjective aversiveness, imminence, and likelihood of a possible event are responsible for its threatening nature, but also the perceived unavailability of "postevent coping strategies," which is about the same as lack of self-efficacy. One need not refer to postevent here, since the prevention of anticipated harm is also at stake. If a student faces an exam, its threat value can be minimized by investing more effort to prepare for it, or the exam can be avoided completely in favor of alternative commitments. Believing in one's capability to avoid an ambiguous event or to prevent its negative impact may be sufficient to reduce the threat value and, in turn, the amount of time spent on worrying. The onset of worry leads to intensified scanning of the environment for dangers and resources, which can be a self-absorbing and arousing process. Arousal may be triggered by such cognitive activity, which is then in contrast to the theory put forward by Borkovec and Lyonfields (1993), who state that worrying helps to reduce undesired physiological arousal. The performance-impairing effect, however, is mainly due to the cognitive activity that prevents the individual to concentrate on the task.
Worry is closely related to hypervigilance, which is seen as a cognitive vulnerability factor in trait anxiety (Eysenck, 1992; Krohne, 1993; Mathews, 1993). Anxious individuals are inclined to scan their environment constantly for ambiguous or aversive stimuli. This is a bias at the level of attention or preattention, as opposed to the memory recall bias typically found in depressives. Depressives show a bias towards negative processing of information about the self, the world, and the future, for example when retrieving information. They recall more information that is related to loss events or other harmful events that occurred in the past, and they tend to attribute negative events more in a stable, internal, and pervasive fashion. The latter has been coined a depressive explanatory style or "learned pessimism" (Seligman, 1991). In contrast to this explicit memory distortion (elaboration of information), there is an implicit memory distortion (priming of information) for anxious individuals, who attend vigilantly to anticipated aversive stimuli. Their focus is on threat instead of loss. They scan their surroundings in a broad fashion while no danger is identified, but turn to a narrow focus after they have detected a threatening stimulus (Eysenck, 1992). Anxious persons are also highly distractible because they have to divert their attention to a variety of potential sources of harm. The selective attentional bias is seen as one reason for performance deficits of anxious individuals. However, performance is multiply determined itself, and attention and memory functioning are just some of the influential factors in the learning and achievement process. Interfering thoughts can be detrimental in a structural or quantitative sense by taking away part of the intellectual resources needed for problem solving. Interfering thoughts can also be detrimental in a qualitative manner if their content allows people to make unfavorable decisions. Intrusive thoughts that are related to lack of coping ability, for example, demotivate people, keeping them from investing more effort and persistence into an enterprise and, thus, leading to premature disengagement. The remainder of this chapter, therefore, is devoted to the motivational effect of intrusive thoughts as opposed to the information processing effect.
The fact that worry is very often related to one's social-evaluative concerns and to lack of confidence in the capabilities required for goal attainment suggests that this specific aspect should be elaborated upon further (Tallis et al., 1992). Research on the effect of cognitive processes in anxiety can be supplemented by research on the motivation effects of worry. Sarason (1988, p. 5) has characterized test anxiety in terms of self-focus: "Proneness to self-preoccupation and, most specifically, to worry over evaluation is a powerful component of what is referred to as test anxiety" (see also Carver & Scheier, 1988; Schwarzer, 1986; Schwarzer & Wicklund, 1991). A subset of worry cognitions pertains to negative thoughts about oneself, one's competence, or one's ability to cope with challenging or threatening demands. These are labeled here self-doubts. Self-doubts are unfavorable thoughts that refer to personal deficits in the self-regulation process and, therefore, represent one example of cognitive interference. Self-doubts are specific pessimistic beliefs while facing a stressful encounter, and thus reflect perceived self-inefficacy at the state level of functioning. Examples are "I doubt whether I can solve this problem," "It is difficult for me to make friends," "I am not confident that I can stick to this diet," or "I feel unable to adopt a strenuous exercise regimen." All of these thoughts are self-related and pertain to one's competence or to similar personal coping resources. In contrast, a homemaker who waits nervously for her husband to return home from work may worry about his safety, health, or life, but those are not self-doubts. Self-doubts represent a specific class of worries that are maladaptive in attaining goals because they interfere with an intended self-regulation process. In contrast to rumination or worry, self-doubts are (always) tied to personal goals. This is why it appears to be suitable for psychologists to study their functioning within an action-theoretical framework.
Imagine an overweight woman who wishes to slim down but does not do anything about it. Nothing will happen unless she transforms her wish into a behavioral intention (or goal). The process that leads to setting an explicit goal is labeled "motivation stage." Wishful thinking can be a good starting point ("I wish I were slim"), but motivation relies rather on specific cognitions that arise while contemplating the pros and cons of a remedial action. Intentions (or goals) represent the endpoint of a motivational process (e.g., "I intend to reduce my calorie intake by 30% by next week"). In determining goals, three kinds of expectancies come into play: (a) situation-outcome expectancies, (b) action-outcome expectancies, and (c) personal resource beliefs.
Situation-outcome expectancies pertain to the belief that the situation will change without the individual's intervention. For example, optimistic statements would be: "In the near future, being overweight will become the beauty ideal," and "Slim women will be regarded as less attractive." A pessimistic statement would be "With increasing age I will become more overweight, as most women do." This cognition is similar to a subjective risk assessment in addressing the question, "What is the likelihood that something beneficial/harmful will happen?" Most people are rather optimistic than realistic in this respect. They distort the available information in favor of more positive outcomes, a phenomenon that has been labeled "optimistic bias" or "defensive optimism" (Schwarzer, 1994; Taylor, 1989; Weinstein, 1982). Anxious individuals, however, worry about ambiguous or unfavorable future events, which is more realistic or pessimistic than optimistic: "I am concerned that something terrible might happen."
Action-outcome expectancies are the perception of contingencies between goal-directed behaviors and their consequences. An optimistic statement is "If I reduce my calorie intake then I would lose weight." A pessimistic statement is "Even if I go on a diet and exercise vigorously, I would not lose weight." The last item represents a worry cognition and may become part of constant ruminations, characterizing, however, depressive mood rather than fearful anticipation.
Only the third kind of cognitions qualifies as self-doubts: Personal resource beliefs (or perceived self-efficacy) refer to one's capability to actually perform a behavior that leads to a desired outcome. This has been theoretically founded by Bandura (1977), and a great deal of research has confirmed the operative power of this construct in various domains of human functioning (Bandura, 1992, 1994). An optimistic example would be, "I am confident that I can run five miles per day even if I am tired." The first part of the sentence refers to the "can-do" notion, while the latter part refers to a barrier that makes the action more difficult (e.g., "...even if it rains, ...if my friends are visiting, ...if nobody would join me," etc.). Not the physical performance is the main focus here, but rather the self-regulatory attempt. A pessimistic statement is, "I feel ambiguous about being able to stick to this diet." Obviously, this is the same as self-doubt. Self-inefficacious thoughts (or self-doubts), however, should not be equated with perceived lack of ability ("I know for sure that I cannot swim across the Channel."). It rather refers to the lack of confidence in performing an action that is within the scope of one's abilities. Truly knowing one's limits as opposed to lacking confidence in what is manageable have different motivational implications. The former lead to setting realistic goals and the latter to setting goals too low, undermining the motivation to strive for excellence and giving rise to rumination. Individuals who are plagued by self-doubts procrastinate difficult decisions, fail to develop challenging intentions, and get stuck in a fruitless contemplation process. They may harbor the necessary action-outcome expectancies, i.e., they may know the contingent "pathways," but they lack a profound sense of "agency" (Skinner, Chapman, & Baltes, 1988; Smith & Wallston, 1992; Snyder et al., 1991).
There is a triangular relationship between self-efficacy, goal setting, and performance. In a meta-analysis of 14 studies, Locke and Latham (1990) found that, on average, self-efficacy is related to performance at r = .39 and to goal setting also at r = .39. The latter was also closely associated with performance (r = .42). It was assumed that goal setting may serve as a mediator between self-efficacy and performance. Thus, there is not only the well-known direct effect of self-efficacy on performance, but also an indirect one through goal setting. Individuals with self-doubts set lower goals, which leads to less accomplishments.
It is, however, not sufficient to examine whether goals are quantitatively high or low. Rather, competent self-regulation requires to set appropriate goals for oneself that are challenging but also within reach (Bagozzi, 1992; Bandura, 1994; Karoly, 1993). Distal goals are less motivating than proximal goals.
Some authors have distinguished between goals and intentions (Locke & Latham, 1990). Intentions are usually seen as being behavioral; for example, a weight loss goal of two pounds within one week pertains to a measurable consequence of a behavior, not the behavior itself, whereas the intention to restrict daily calorie intake to a defined level is clearly behavioral (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980). It has also been found that there are individual differences in the level of abstraction that people prefer in their strivings. Emmons (1992) has distinguished "low-level strivers" who are concerned with minor daily tasks or challenges (such as household chores) from "high-level strivers" who define their goals as more abstract, diffuse, or philosophical (see also Emmons, King, & Sheldon, 1993).
Another distinction has been made by Gollwitzer (1993): "goal intentions" as opposed to "implementation intentions." A goal intention is, for example, "I intend to compose a chapter"; an implementation intention is, for example, "When I have finished grading the essays tonight I will start writing the chapter by making an outline." Instead of simply describing a desired behavior or behavioral outcome, the latter kind of intention specifies the conditions under which the behavior will be performed. Thus, it is more proximal and precise by referring to the where and when of an action. It has been found that intentions are more likely to be followed by appropriate actions if they are worded in a manner describing the implementation. Moreover, an "implemental mind-set" seems to be typical for the postdecisional phase, whereas a "deliberative mind-set" appears to be more characteristic for the preceding motivation phase (Gollwitzer & Kinney, 1989). When individuals are more deliberative they ponder the alternative options realistically or skeptically before making a decision. When they are in a more implemental mind-set they feel overly optimistic about success and are unaffected by self-doubts.
An author who has decided to compose a chapter will not immediately rush to his desk and start writing. Similarly, a smoker who has decided to quit will not immediately discard the remaining cigarettes. Rather, postintentional cognitions will dominate one's mind when an intention has been formed. In this preactional stage, the individual searches for opportunities to act, designs appropriate strategies to start or to try the intended behavior, and compares alternative courses of action that seem to promise success. The question is to what degree such cognitions guide the attempt to change the behavior or lead to procrastination or even disengagement before any action is taken. After the individual has passed through this stage and is acting, the question remains how cognitions can protect the ongoing action from distracting events and under which conditions they fail to maintain the desired behavior and allow to relapse into undesired states. The next sections deal with the particular role of self-doubts in debilitating such processes.
In the postintentional preactional stage, mental activities prevail that mainly resemble planning. Therefore, we use the shorter label "planning stage" synonymously. It includes implementation intentions. In planning, one can have explicit trains of thought or implicit images of how the events might unfold. Designing possible courses of action requires attention, mental efforts, and creativity. Individuals who harbor self-doubts direct their attention to negative outcomes and to their perceived lack of coping skills when barriers arise. Instead of inventing useful strategies to overcome difficulties they dwell on various kinds of remote possibilities of what could go awry. They imagine failure scenarios where they see themselves failing at their self-imposed challenges, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. The author who intends to write a chapter doubts his capability to write something valuable at this specific moment and postpones the task until a better opportunity comes up. The smoker does not believe to be ready for quitting while stress is imminent and postpones the actual quitting until the "right moment." Directing one's attention to the self and to limitations of one's coping resources inhibits the individual in moving forward and in gaining momentum. This procrastination is a typical consequence of debilitating cognitions after a decision to act has been made. On the other hand, it is not always appropriate to act impulsively because this could jeopardize one's intention by running into unforeseen danger or difficulties. Rather, it is important to plan optimistically and realistically and to examine carefully the options that facilitate success.
As we all know, a good intention is no guarantee for successful action. In particular, rumination about one's capability to actually perform the critical behavior distracts from constructive attempts to find the best possible coping strategy. A lack of effortful attention on pathways for change leads to procrastination or even disengagement from the intention. What is needed, therefore, is self-efficacy to cope with barriers that make the intended action so difficult. Self-efficacious individuals imagine success scenarios where they make fruitful attempts and pass through different courses of action that lead to positive outcomes. They are more creative because, while trusting their capabilities, they see more options and invent more strategies. Optimistic self-beliefs at this stage have been labeled "action self-efficacy" (Marlatt, Baer, & Quigley, 1994). Accordingly, we can refer to the opposite of it as "action self-doubts."
This initiation stage has been widely neglected in previous research. The focus is commonly on actual performance, not on the immediate cognitive processes that precede the action. A compromise lies in the focus on trying. Finding out how and how often someone tries a difficult or new behavior gives an impression of how strong the goal commitment might be or to what degree self-doubts have been overcome. A Theory of Trying (Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1990) specifically aims at predicting the intention to try and actual trying. It has been designed as an elaboration of the former Theory of Reasoned Action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975).
Procrastination means that people fail to plan realistically the details of the intended action and do not even try, whereas someone who tries documents not only that goal commitment is sufficiently high, but also that initial self-doubts have been overcome. Failing to maintain or complete successfully an intended course of action, on the other hand, represents a relapse.
When the author eventually sits at his desk and composes the first pages of his self-imposed ordeal, he might feel it difficult to keep writing. The phrases do not come fluently and he feels distracted by a number of stimuli such as hunger, phone calls, heat, and intrusive thoughts. The latter might refer to other business or to this specific task, such as "Can I meet the deadline?", "Am I really competent to write this chapter?", "Would someone else do a better job?", "Why am I so slow?", or "Are my writing skills declining with age?" These are "coping self-doubts" that reflect one's ambiguity about one's competence to carry through a difficult assignment. It refers to one's lack of confidence to cope with critical phases within the process of action when difficulties arise and setbacks occur.
While the smoker is surviving the first smoke-free day(s), he faces withdrawal symptoms and experiences high-risk situations with the frequent urge to smoke. Taking initial action is not enough-one has to maintain abstinence forever as part of a new life-style. Again, coping self-doubts arise that include thoughts such as, "Can I make it?", "Do I have the willpower necessary to stay abstinent?", "Am I able to withstand risky situations?", "Can I resist if someone offers me a cigarette while I'm drinking alcohol?"
This stage is a "volitional" phase where the former intention has to be maintained by a number of supportive means, such as optimistic cognitions, avoidance of high-risk situations, or coping with barriers. Self-doubts are the worst enemy and need to be replaced by self-efficacious thoughts in line with positive accomplishments. Mastery experience is the best way to gain confidence in one's capabilities to perform the difficult action. Therefore, it is essential to set proximal goals that are within one's reach to avoid failure. The course of action could be subdivided into a number of goals with increasing difficulty to ensure goal attainment and positive feedback, which in turn would stabilize one's self-efficacy.
However, setbacks cannot always be avoided. The author realizes that the last pages he has written in a painful process of self-regulation are below his standards and need to be discarded. This experience "knocks him down," he ruminates for hours, cannot get back to his desk, and finally decides to give up and disengage from this project. He does not believe he would be able to recover from this setback and start again from scratch. His ruminations are filled with "recovery self-doubts."
Similarly, the smoker might have given in to the urge to smoke while enjoying a coffee break during a stressful day. He only wanted to take one or two puffs, but could not stop and went into a full-blown relapse, smoking 20 cigarettes a day as before. This scenario of relapse has been labeled "abstinence violation effect" (Marlatt et al., 1994). A minor lapse turns into a major relapse because the individual has not learned to cope with a setback that occurs typically in a high-risk situation. "Recovery self-doubts" let him believe that he has no willpower, cannot stop the downward trend, and is unable to get back on track with some effort.
The distinction between action self-doubts, coping self-doubts, and recovery self-doubts may be a useful attempt to add a time perspective to the experience of worry. Different stages and events within a self-regulatory cycle give rise to intrusive thoughts that deal with ambiguity about one's lack of competence to master a difficult task.
It has been found that worry represents the key feature in trait anxiety and in generalized anxiety disorder, and that individual differences in worry can be assessed in various domains of life. Beyond these descriptive facts, it is important to study the causal role of worry when it comes to behaviors and emotions. Past research on anxiety and performance has pointed to worry as the critical component in this relationship: Worry is more closely associated with performance than emotionality, which leads to the conclusion that intrusive thoughts are the causal agent in the achievement impairment process. More recent research has aimed at this explanatory value of the worry construct by examining the actual cognitive processes that take place under more or less stressful conditions.
The present chapter goes further in a different direction by identifying a subclass of worry, labeled self-doubts. When intrusive thoughts occur within a goal attainment process, these thoughts are mostly self-evaluative and refer to the possibility that one's coping resources might not be sufficient to secure mastery of the challenging or threatening demands. The construct of self-doubts has a particular operative power in different areas of human functioning. Worrying about personal resource deficits interferes with goal setting, planning, action initiation, and action maintenance. The focus here is on the motivational pathway to performance impairment, as opposed to the cognitive capacity pathway, which suggests that the processing of threat information does not allow the deployment of sufficient attention to the task. Rather, it is argued that overattending to the self and underestimating one's capability has a motivational and volitional effect that interrupts or changes self-regulatory attempts in goal attainment.
To create a heuristic template for further research, a distinction has been made between action self-doubts, coping self-doubts, and recovery self-doubts. Although the worry content is about the same in all cases, these labels may help to guide stage-specific research. Linking intrusive thoughts to a self-regulatory goal attainment process is a useful means to suggest experimental intervention studies and to discourage cross-sectional correlations studies that cannot shed further light into this field.
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Figure 1
A stage model linking cognitions to the adoption, initiation, and maintenance of actions.