The Definition (s) of Anxiety
Raymond B. Cattell · JAMA · 1964
To the Editor:— As a clinician, Dr. Sagebiel is entitled to any definition of anxiety that occurs to him, such as "anxiety is the reality expression of an unconscious emotional force." This approach will lead to about as many definitions as there are psychiatrists—probably more. The multivariate experimental approach, on the other hand, leads to a universal definition by all who investigate the field. We have simply taken several hundred alleged and commonly accepted manifestations of anxiety and have found their degree of mutual correlation, both in normal population samples and in clinical samples. We have then applied the method of factor analysis to answer the question, "Are there several anxieties or is there a single, functionally unitary anxiety?" We obtained a clear experimental answer that there is a single general anxiety factor which factor analysis shows to be distinct from the stress response, from a regression pattern, and from