Effects of competition: The tendency for those prone to pathological worry to selectively process threat-related information is modelled here as a function of competition between alternative processing options (i.e. task-related representations versus threat representations).
Field would argue that the information evokes a conceptual representation of threat and in doing so the associative connection between the concepts of "dogs" and "threat" is strengthened.
These terms included complementarity, effectiveness, efficiency, representation, and threat (Table 1).
We selected 12 main SCP terms to focus on: adequacy, comprehensiveness, representativeness, representation, complementarity, threat, vulnerability, effectiveness, efficiency, irreplaceability, flexibility, and replacement cost.
Subsequent evocations of the mental representations of dogs would, therefore, become more likely to also evoke a representation of threat and the behaviors and feelings driven by that representation.
Here, we review the usage and meaning of the 12 biogeographic-economic core concepts of SCP: adequacy, complementarity, comprehensiveness, effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility, irreplaceability, replacement cost, representation, representativeness, threat, and vulnerability.
In this case the internal representation of threat is activated more strongly than before (see larger unfilled ascending arrow in Fig. 2), due to the greater influence of involuntary bottom-up influences – emotional processing biases and well-practiced habits of thought.
In summary, negative thoughts initially intrude into awareness as the result of a combination of stronger unintentional "bottom-up" influences that serve to activate representations of threat; and insufficient voluntary "top-down" control to overcome the competing threat representations, leading to loss of attention to the original focus.
As noted above, one reason that some people become locked into cycles of worry is that habitual interpretation and attentional biases operate on the content of negative intrusive thoughts themselves (see right-most upward arrow), just as they do on pre-conscious representations of threat cues or memories.
For example, if detecting the presence of a possible imminent danger is the current goal (rather than another task), then we would expect that top-down resources would be directed towards that goal, strengthening representations of threat cues and promoting attention to them.
