Depressive, anxious and intrusive thoughts in psychiatric inpatients and outpatients

A revised form of the Distressing Thoughts Questionnaire as well as standardized self-report measures of depression, anxiety and obsessionality were administered to a large sample of psychiatric inpatients, outpatients and non-clinical controls. A subsample of the clinical subjects completed the questionnaire battery after 3 months. Factor analysis identified three distinct dimensions of negative thinking which corresponded to anxious, depressive and intrusive thoughts. Further analysis revealed that the intrusive thoughts differed from the anxious and depressive negative automatic thoughts in terms of their reduced association with psychopathology, increased temporal stability and nonspecific association with negative affect in general. These findings suggest that by adopting a more specific focus on obsessive-like ego-dystonic intrusive thoughts, researchers will be in a better position to investigate the role of this phenomena in the development of clinical obsessions.