Anxiety Sensitivity, State and Trait Anxiety, and Perception of Change in Sympathetic Nervous System Arousal
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 25 females and 11 males aged between who were psychology and microbiology postgraduate students at the University of Adelaide. Participants were excluded if they had uncontrolled high blood pressure or asthma that might have been aggravated by some of the experimental tasks or if they were taking sedatives, tranquilizers, or beta-blockers which might have interfered with SNS activity.
State-Trait Anxiety Inventory
State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (Spielberger, 1983)
Treatment of Data
On each of the state anxiety, trait anxiety, and anxiety sensitivity measures, the 36 participants were divided into two groups by a median split. Table 1 shows the mean, standard deviation, and range for each anxiety group. For each of these measures, the data for the low and high groups fulfilled assumptions of normality of distribution. Requirements for homogeneity of variance for the low and high trait anxiety groups were met, as they were for the ASI groups after transformation. The
Discussion
In summary, state anxiety was unrelated to accurate perception of different levels of PTT for all self-report somatic variables, except when perception of pulse rate was correlated with PTT. In general, analyses showed that more participants in the high trait anxiety group and the high anxiety sensitivity group could accurately perceive different levels of sympathetic arousal as indexed here by PTT. This was so for all self-report measures except stomach tension for high trait anxiety and
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