ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of worry in different anxiety disorders, starting with generalised anxiety disorder, but goes on to explore what role it may have in other psychological disorders and how it may differ for neurodiverse children. Several studies have aimed to determine whether there is symptom specificity across worry and rumination, with worry predicting anxiety disorders and rumination predicting depression. Worry has relatively recently been proposed as an important process in psychosis. The association between worry and sleep is also robust for children and adolescents across the age range from pre-schoolers to late adolescents. Pain is another phenomenon of childhood and adolescence that is both normal and yet can become pathological. The common finding across both groups of adolescents was that they reported that worry was less intense than anxiety. Worry does seem to be part of the experience in lots of psychological disorders, not just the anxiety disorders.
