Trait Anxiety

Synonyms

Neuroticism

Definition

Trait anxiety refers to the stable tendency to attend to, experience, and report negative emotions such as fears, worries, and anxiety across many situations. This is part of the personality dimension of neuroticism versus emotional stability. Trait anxiety also manifests by repeated concerns about and reporting of body symptoms. Trait anxiety is characterized by a stable perception of environmental stimuli (events, others’ statements) as threatening. Trait-anxious people often experience and express also state anxiety, in situations in which most people do not experience such responses. This bias is thought to reflect a cognitive-perceptual bias. At the perceptual level, there is an over-attentional bias to threatening stimuli. At the cognitive level, there is a distorted negative interpretation of information congruent with and fostering anxious responses. Finally, at the level of memory, there is over-recall of threatening information. These three...