Temperamental contributions to the affect family of anxiety

A large proportion of scientists and clinicians write about anxiety as if this concept referred to a unitary natural phenomenon, and the intellectual challenge was to achieve consensus on the correct definition and discover the most valid measurements of this process. The continued reliance by investigators on familiar words like anxiety presumes that the human communities that invented this contextually unconstrained term eons ago possessed a profound insight into the nature of human emotions. The popular words for emotions were intended to communicate to another that an agent experienced consciously a change in body tone that could not be attributed to an organic need. Further, the community of listeners understood that the agent was accommodating to the incentive and accompanying thoughts when a word was selected to describe the feeling state. The evidence used to infer the emotional state of anxiety in humans can include verbal report, observed behavior, and physiology. These classes of information are not correlated highly. Therefore, the meaning of anxiety inferred from one source is not equivalent to the meaning inferred from another. That is, a verbal report of anxiety over one's economic position need not be correlated with the biological profile scientists presume is the basis for that emotion. A serious problem with the current construct of anxiety is that investigators are prone to award the same term to four distinctly different phenomena.