The Nature of Trait Anxiety: Cognitive and Biological Vulnerability

This paper examines the nature of trait anxiety using self-report and objective measures of biological, behavioral, and cognitive characteristics as predictors in multiple regression analyses. Trait anxiety was associated with self-reported psychological maladjustment and psychosomatic disorders, but not with actual physical capacity and skills, cardiovascular fitness, or biochemical parameters. Under social-evaluative stress, trait anxiety was associated with self-reported cognitive and somatic state anxiety, but only slightly with actual behavioral anxiety (only gaze avoidance) and physiological arousal (only heart rate recovery). There was high stability in relationships over a 3-month period. These results favor a cognitive, rather than a biological, conceptualization of trait anxiety. It is suggested that a cognitive bias to focus on internal threat-related stimuli is a vulnerability factor in trait anxiety that predisposes to anxiety disorders.