Fearfulness and anxiety in research on temperament: Temperamental traits are related to anxiety disorders

Jan Strelau , Bogdan Zawadzki

Abstract

There is a growing interest in temperament that has been developing parallel to studies on emotion, especially on trait-anxiety and anxiety disorders. Depending on the adopted definition of temperament and the understanding of the construct ‘‘anxiety”, different temperament–anxiety relationships are proposed. In studies based on the regulative theory of temperament (RTT), it was demonstrated that emotional reactivity (tendency to react intensively to emotion-generating stimuli), perseveration (tendency to continue and repeat emotional states), as well as briskness (tendency to react quickly and shift easily from one behavior to another) are strongly related to fearfulness considered as a synonym of trait-anxiety. Among other things, our findings show that (1) fearfulness and RTT traits, such as emotional reactivity, perseveration, and briskness, have essential loadings on the factor identified as neuroticism, (2) there is a genetic covariance between fearfulness and emotional reactivity, perseveration and briskness, (3) emotional reactivity contributes mostly to the variance of PTSD symptoms (in flood and fire survivors), (4) among the RTT traits, emotional reactivity is mainly associated with symptoms of anxiety disorders (briskness and perseveration to a lower extent).