Anxiety: Its Meaning and Measurement

Anxiety emerged as a central problem and a predominant theme of modern life in the 20th century, which the French author Albert Camus referred to as “the century of fear” (May, 1950/1977). The Age of Anxiety was the title of both Leonard Bernstein's Second Symphony and a poetic work by W. H. Auden (May, 1950/1977). Inspired by Bernstein's music and Auden's poem, Jerome Robbins choreographed a contemporary ballet, which he also titled the Age of Anxiety (Mason, 1954). The significant impact of anxiety in literature, music, art, and religion, as well as in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology, was cogently described by Rollo May (1950/1977) in his classic book, The Meaning of Anxiety. May also documents concern with anxiety in the philosophical work of Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and, especially, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, who considered fear to be a state of mind characterized by the expectation that something painful or unpleasant might happen.

Although the pervasive influence of anxiety on human behavior was not generally recognized until the 20th century, concerns with fear are as old as the history of humankind. The concept of fear was clearly represented in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Old Testament, and in Greek and Roman literature (May, 1950/1977). The importance of fear was clearly recognized by Charles Darwin (1872/1965), who considered this emotion to be an inherent characteristic that had evolved in both humans and animals as an adaptive response over countless generations. Observable manifestations of fear included: rapid palpitations of the heart, trembling, increased perspiration, changes in voice quality, erection of the hair, and peculiar facial expression. Consistent with contemporary definitions of anxiety, Darwin observed that fear varied in intensity, from mild apprehension or surprise, to an extreme “agony of terror.”

The physiological manifestations that Darwin attributed to fear were also recognized as symptoms of anxiety by Sigmund Freud (1933/1959, 1936). However, Freud emphasized the experiential qualities of anxiety, which he defined as “something felt,” an unpleasant emotional state characterized by subjective feelings of chronic apprehension, and by “all that is covered by the word ‘nervousness’” (1895/1924, p. 79). The perceived presence of danger, according to Freud, evoked an anxiety state that served to warn the individual that some form of adjustment was necessary. Stimulated by psychoanalytic theory, clinical studies of anxiety have been reported in the psychiatric literature with increasing regularity. Pavlov's (1927) discovery of experimental neurosis also stimulated numerous investigations of fear and anxiety in animals. However, prior to 1950, there were relatively[Page 60] few experimental studies of anxiety in humans. Ethical problems associated with inducing anxiety in the laboratory contributed to this paucity of research, which could not advance beyond a prescientific level until objective and reliable measures of anxiety were available.

The Taylor (1951, 1953) Manifest Anxiety Scale (TMAS) was the first of a number of widely used psychometric instruments designed to assess anxiety in adults. The rationale for constructing the TMAS, which has been used extensively in research on motivation and learning (Spence & Spence, 1966), was based on the assumption that anxious people are chronically more emotional and consistently higher in motivation or drive level than persons low in anxiety. The 50 TMAS items were selected from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Hathaway & McKinley, 1942, 1951) on the basis of a textbook description of the symptoms observed in patients with anxiety neurosis (Cameron, 1947), a clinical syndrome first identified by Freud (1895/1924). Respondents to the TMAS report whether or not each item describes how they generally feel.

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