Anxiety trait

Lesch, K. P., Bengel, D., Heils, A. etal. (1996). Association of anxiety related traits with a polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region. Science, 274, 1527-31. 

Parrott AC and Kentridge R (1982). Personal constructs of anxiety under the 1.5-benzodiazepine derivative clobazam, related to trait-anxiety levels of the personality. Psychopharmacology, 78, 353-357. 

Esterling, B.A. et al., Defensiveness, trait anxiety, and Epstein-Barr viral capsid antigen antibody titers in healthy college students, Health Psychol., 12, 132, 1993. 

Another way that professionals assess for psychiatric disorders is to use an inventory that assesses for personality characteristics. The most famous of these inventories is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which is now in its second edition as an instrument. Although the MMPI is actually a personality inventory, as it names suggests, many professionals will use it to spot suspected psychiatric disorders, such as depression, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and Anxiety Disorder. The MMPI has several scales to assess common personality traits, such as depression, mania, psychopathic deviance, and even alcohol and drug use (Weed, Butcher, McKenna, Ben-Porath, 1992). 

Emotions are subjective mood states that interact reciprocally with cognitive processes. Personality refers to traits of emotion and behavior that are more stable over time. Normal and pathological emotional states can be measured, to some degree, with objective tests to quantify changes in mood over time (or after drug treatment). Thus, several clinical scales have been developed for anxiety, depression, and mania. These measures are particularly useful for evaluating the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic herbs. 

First, anxiety is not a unitary phenomenon, as it includes innate (trait) anxiety, which is considered to be an enduring feature of an individual, and situation-evoked or experience-related (state) anxiety. Since tests for anxiety in rodents are always restricted to the evaluation of situation-evoked behavior, it might be difficult to investigate trait anxiety in animals. However, the two phenomena are not separable from each other, as individuals with a high trait-anxiety often will show an increased tendency to also display high state anxiety. Thus, the term anxiety will be used without an a priori assumption of trait or state anxiety. 

Strobel A, Gutknecht L, Zheng Y, Reif A, Brocke B, Lesch KP (2003) Allelic variation of serotonin receptor 1A function is associated with anxiety- and depression-related traits. J Neural Transm 110 1445-1453... 

Unlike AVP, oxytocin does not seem to be involved in trait anxiety, as its expression and release in the PVN did not differ between HAB and LAB rats (Wigger et al. 2004). 

Landgraf R, Wigger A (2002) High vs low anxiety-related behavior rats an animal model of extremes in trait anxiety. Behav Genet 32 301-314 Landgraf R, Wigger A (2003) Born to be anxious neuroendocrine and genetic correlates of trait anxiety in HAB rats. Stress 6 111-119... 

Mazzanti, C.M., Lappalainen, J., Long, J.C., Bengel, D., Naukkari-nen, H., Eggert, M., Virkkunen, M., Linnoila, M., and Goldman, D. (1998) Role of the serotonin transporter promoter polymorphism in anxiety-related traits. Arch Gen Psychiatry 55 936-940. 

Osher, Y., Hamer, D., and Benjamin,. (2000). Association and linkage of anxiety-related traits with a functional polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene regulatory region in Israeli sibling pairs. Mol Psychiatry 5 216-219. 

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