People’s beliefs in their coping efficacy influence vigilance toward potential threats and how
they are perceived and cognitively processed. People who believe they can exercise control over
threats do not conjure up calamities and distress themselves. But those who believe that potential
threats are unmanageable view many aspects of their environment as fraught with danger.
They dwell on their coping deficiencies, magnify the severity of possible threats, and worry
about perils that rarely if ever happen. Through such inefficacious trains of thought, they distress
themselves and constrain and impair their level of functioning