The Relationship of Self-Esteem and Attributional Style to Young Peoples' Worries

Abstract

In this study, we developed a simple measure of worriedness for use with teenage and adult samples. Existing measures of anxiety have been primarily concerned with clinical diagnosis, and little research has been conducted into the relationship between general levels of worriedness and specific worries about external/natural and sociopolitical events. We showed that levels of worry are related to levels of self-esteem and to the individual's attributional style. We also showed, however, that concerns and worries about certain external events are related to political world views, as Cotgrove (1982) predicted, and they had implications for levels of political activity among the 13- to 18-year-old British teenagers that we sampled.