Impact of Worry on Career Thoughts, Career Decision State, and Cognitive Information Processing Skills

Abstract

Sixty‐nine Amazon Mechanical Turk workers completed the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (Berle et al., 2011), the Career Thoughts Inventory (Sampson et al., 1996a), and the Career State Inventory (Leierer et al., 2017). Worry was significantly correlated with negative career thinking and its dimensions of decision‐making confusion and commitment anxiety, with readiness and its dimensions of clarity and certainty, and with the self‐assessed cognitive information processing skills of self‐knowledge, options knowledge, decision‐making, and executive processing. Worry was also found to predict the degree of readiness for career decision‐making, negative career thinking, and cognitive information processing requisite skills.