Do we Worry about the Past and Grieve for the Future? Situated Anxiety or Depression, Mood Valence and Affective Time Travel, Separated by Experiment in a Questionnaire

Some psychologists have viewed sadness and depression as reactions to past loss, while regarding fear and anxiety as responses to future threat. Such assumptions conflict with common experience of gloom about the future and worry about the past. Recent research on these issues by experiment and/or by questionnaire remains inconclusive. The psychometric questionnaires purport to be situation-free and the laboratory experiments use artificial tasks; hence, neither approach addresses realities in the present, past or future. In recent psychometrics, the distinction between anxiety and depression has been dissolved into one category of negative affect. One widely used inventory for separating the two emotions conflates depression with the absence of a good mood. These deficiencies were addressed in a diverse convenience sample (N = 379) by running an experiment entirely within a questionnaire. Each of the 40 question items was a miniature vignette, describing a past or future emotive situation while in bad or good mood. Five categories of situation varied in proportion of threat to loss. Strength and valence of affective response were measured by degree of autobiographical assent to or dissent from an item. This inventory provides fully affect-balanced situation-oriented depression / anxiety scaling.Effect sizes from analysis of variance showed that anxiety arises from past as well as future threats, while depression is at least as strongly oriented to losses in the future as in the past. Variation in category of situation or in valence of mood also had substantial effects. It is concluded that worry and gloom travel freely across time and situations, whether present mood is bad or good. Both laboratory experiments and psychometric scales come closer to actual processes of emotion and motivation when they revivify familiar situations using valence-balanced verbal stimuli.