Anxiety Symptomatology: The Association With Distress Tolerance and Anxiety Sensitivity
Section snippets
Participants
The study sample was composed of 418 individuals from a large public university in the southeastern United States. Study participants were primarily female (71%) with an average age of 18.8 (SD = 2.39). The racial and ethnic makeup of the sample is as follows: Caucasian (69.4%), African American (11.5%), Hispanic/Latino (12.7%), Asian (4.5%), and other (1.9%).
Procedure
Participants registered for a testing session through the psychology department's secure and confidential electronic research sign-up
Results
Table 1 presents zero-order correlations between study variables as well as means and standard deviations. Consistent with expectation and prior research, the DTS was significantly and negatively associated with the OCIR, PDSR, PSWQ, and SIAS. The zero-order level of association suggested DT was moderately to substantially associated with these various anxiety symptom domains. The robustness of the relationship between the DTS and the anxiety symptom measures was further assessed by
Discussion
The primary aim of this study was to examine the relationship between DT and anxiety symptomatology. Though research has begun to explore the connection between DT and the important anxiety risk factor AS, to our knowledge this is the first study to examine DT and the association between DT and AS across a range of anxiety symptom dimensions. Consistent with expectation, DT was negatively associated with each of the anxiety symptom measures (panic, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive, and
Acknowledgement
This paper was supported in part by a National Institutes of Mental Health award (1F31 MH086174-01).
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