Elsevier

Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Volume 14, Issue 4, July–August 2000, Pages 413-427
Journal of Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety Sensitivity, State and Trait Anxiety, and Perception of Change in Sympathetic Nervous System Arousal

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0887-6185(00)00031-1Get rights and content

Abstract

—The psychological models of panic disorder predict that persons with this condition may demonstrate enhanced acuity for somatic stimuli, but research to date has produced conflicting results. Most studies have investigated acuity for cardiovascular responses such as heart rate, which may represent an inadequate test of this hypothesis because they would be unlikely to detect persons who respond maximally to panic through other physiological systems. The present study investigated the detection of changes in pulse transit time (PTT), as a reliable and omnibus measure of sympathetic nervous system activity, with 36 healthy volunteers. We found that accurate perception of changes in PTT was consistently related to higher levels of trait anxiety and anxiety sensitivity, both of which are risk factors for the development of anxiety disorders in general, and panic disorder in particular.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 25 females and 11 males aged between 20 and 63 years M = 36.69 years, SD = 14.26 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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