The purpose of the present study was twofold. First, to examine the psychometric properties of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) and the Metacognitions Questionnaire-30 (MCQ-30) in a Turkish sample. Second, to investigate metacognitive predictors of pathological worry and obsessive-compulsive (o-c) symptoms in this group. The sample included 561 non-clinical participants. Consistent with non-English versions, the Turkish version of the PSWQ was found to have a two-factor structure. The MCQ-30 was shown to be composed of five factors similar to the English version. Reliability analyses indicated that both the PSWQ and MCQ-30 possessed high internal consistency, split-half reliability and test-retest coefficients. As expected, both scales positively correlated with measures of o-c symptoms, trait anxiety, and anxiety and depression, as well as with each other. Negative and positive metacognitive beliefs about worry were significant predictors of both pathological worry and o-c symptoms. Cognitive confidence emerged as a specific predictor of worry, while beliefs about the need to control thoughts emerged as a unique predictor of o-c symptoms.

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Metacognitions about smoking appear to be a stronger mediator than smoking outcome expectancies in the relationship between negative affect and cigarette use/nicotine dependence. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Software engineering is a set of activities that relies no only on technical tasks but also requires abilities focused on social duties such as daily meetings and product introduction presentations. However, engineers may experience elevated levels of anxiety when required to present their work in an unfamiliar environment. More specifically, they may suffer from public speaking anxiety even though they are supposed to be effective in those social tasks as well as in their engineering activities. Fortunately, previous studies suggest that virtual exposure therapy is an effective strategy to reduce public speaking anxiety. In this study, an interactive 3D virtual environment similar to real classrooms and auditoriums was developed to examine if this might decrease the anxiety levels of novice software engineers. To compare traditional and virtual exposure therapy, the sample set (N = 14) was divided equally into 2 groups including one experimental group and one control group. For 4 weeks, the virtual exposure therapy was conducted in the experimental group whereas psychoeducation was used in the control group. The findings from our study illustrate that virtual exposure therapy may be represent an alternative solution to the traditional therapeutic intervention for software engineers seeking to overcome public presentation anxiety.