Nuclear War as a Source of Adolescent Worry: Relationships with Age, Gender, Trait Emotionality, and Drug Use

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Abstract
The present study compared the extent to which adolescents worry about nuclear war to their frequency of worry about other issues that are salient in their everyday lives. In addition, we examined empirical relationships between worry about nuclear war and the following variables: grade level, gender, trait emotionality, and drug use. Subjects were 1,043 eighth graders and 739 twelfth graders who completed an 11-item worry inventory embedded in a multidimensional drug-use survey. Results revealed that young people worry more often about such issues as school performance and negative social interactions than they do about nuclear war and that early adolescents and older female adolescents reported higher overall worry levels than late adolescent males. Moreover, whereas worry about nuclear war was significantly associated with death-related rumination, nuclear worries were negligibly related to general negative affect and level of drug use. Results are discussed with respect to sex role socialization processes, cognitive developmental factors, conceptual similarities between nuclear war and death, and the implications of these results for nuclear education.