This study evaluated a theoretical hierarchical relationship among the general anxiety vulnerability variable of neuroticism, the specific vulnerability variables of anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty, and variables reflecting specific anxiety foci including panic symptoms, health anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms and generalized anxiety/worry. Questionnaires assessing these variables were administered to a non-clinical sample of 91 first-year psychology students (64.8% women). Path analysis results were highly consistent with the hypothesized hierarchical model. Neuroticism was found to have a significant direct effect on both anxiety sensitivity and intolerance of uncertainty. Both neuroticism and anxiety sensitivity had direct significant effects on panic symptoms, neuroticism and intolerance of uncertainty both made significant direct contributions to the prediction of worry, and neuroticism made a significant direct contribution to the prediction of obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Contrary to the hypothesized model, anxiety sensitivity but not neuroticism uniquely predicted health anxiety. The results of this study provide initial empirical evidence for a hierarchical relationship among general and specific vulnerabilities, and specific anxiety manifestations.

The authors collected a series of 236 cases of multiple personality (MPD) reported to them by 203 psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and other health care professionals. MPD patients experienced extensive sexual (79.2%) and physical (74.9%) abuse as children. They had been in the health care system for an average of 6.7 years before being diagnosed with MPD and had an average of 15.7 personalities at the time of reporting. The most common alter personalities were a child personality (86.0%), a personality of a different age (84.5%), a protector personality (84.0%), and a persecutor personality (84.0%). Patients MPD are highly suicidal with 72% attempting suicide and 2.1% being successful. The patients frequently received diagnoses for other mental disorders. The most common previous diagnoses were for affective disorders (63.7%), personality disorders (57.4%), anxiety disorders (44.3%), and schizophrenia (40.8%).

Preliminary evidence from a study using a modified Stroop paradigm suggests that individuals with chronic pain selectively attend to pain-related information. The current study was conducted in an attempt to replicate and extend this finding. Nineteen patients with chronic pain stemming from musculoskeletal injury and 22 healthy control subjects participated. All participants completed a computerised task designed to evaluate attentional allocation to cues thematically related to pain and injury via measurement of detection latencies for dot-probes that followed their presentation. Results indicated that patients did not differ from control subjects in their pattern of responses to dot-probes that were presented following either the pain- or injury-related cues. This pattern of results continued to hold true after including level of depression as a covariate in the analysis. However, when patients were divided on the basis of scores on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (Peterson, R.A. and Reiss, S., Anxiety Sensitivity Index Manual, 2nd edn., International Diagnostic Systems, Worthington, OH, 1992), a measure related to fear of pain (Asmundson, G.J.G. and Norton, G.R., Behav. Res. Ther., 34 (1996) 545-554), those with low anxiety sensitivity shifted attention away from stimuli related to pain whereas those with high anxiety sensitivity responded similarly to dot-probes regardless of the parameters of presentation. These results suggest that the operation of the information processing system in patients with chronic pain may be dependent on a patient's trait predisposition to fear pain. Theoretical and ecological implications are discussed.

This study sought to provide information on the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) with respect to psychometric properties, gender differences, and relation to depression. A sample of 291 psychiatric patients completed the BAI, and a subsample of 251 completed the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). The results from factor analyses demonstrated that the BAI has 2 factors, corresponding to cognitive and somatic symptoms. Although men and women did not differ in terms of factor structures, they did differ on mean levels of cognitive and somatic symptom scores and on total BAI scores. Finally, the authors found that BAI items were distinguishable from BDI items, suggesting that the symptoms measured in the two scales are not entirely overlapping.

This study served to replicate and extend our previously obtained hierarchical model of the relationships among general anxiety vulnerabilities, specific anxiety vulnerabilities and specific anxiety manifestations including panic symptoms, health anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms and worry. Questionnaires assessing these variables, as well as positive affectivity and depressiveness, were administered to 125 outpatients seeking treatment for panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder. The results, using a clinical sample, were highly consistent with the hierarchical model obtained in the previous study using a student sample. A more elaborate model, based on published theoretical and empirical evidence, was identified and tested, and similar results were obtained. Negative affectivity had expected direct positive effects on all of the specific anxiety and depression manifestations, with the exception of health anxiety, which showed a negative relationship, and OCD symptoms, which showed no relationship. Positive affectivity was found to be a specific risk factor for depression, while intolerance of uncertainty was found to be a specific risk factor for worry and depression. Finally, anxiety sensitivity appears to be a significant risk factor for panic and health anxiety.