Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2009, 6 2818 the higher anxiety level was related to higher prevalence of workplace violence [24]. The explanation of this result might be the anxiety of staffs could provoke patient’s emotion and in turn to a violence behavior. The result that the group with very, or extremely worry did not show as a statistically significant risk factor might be due to the small sample size. Other findings of this study were that the nursing staffs with the age younger than 30 and older than 44, female, shorter duration of employment and anxiety level were the risk groups. This finding that young age and shorter employment duration were violence risk factors was comparable with another study in Taiwan [19]. Regarding the staff aged over 44, we supposed that they had been working in this hospital since the asylum era. They are used to using authority to instruct patients and seemed more likely to encounter PV and VA [24]. The fact that female is vulnerable to violence, especially sexual harassment, was mentioned in [25,26]. Previous studies demonstrated that the demographics were unrelated to the violence [27,28]. In our study demographic data, such as education level, marital status, and religion belief were not consistent with various type of violence. But after adjustment, high school level of education, unmarried, and religious group seemed to be the risk factor of physical violence and verbal abuse. Working in acute ward was a risk factor for physical and sexual assault. So, it might be very important to control the patients’ psychotic symptom to prevent this kind of workplace violence [29]. Even though the incidence of bullying and mobbing and sexual harassment was low; these issues actually remained in this hospital. Because such kind of violence impacted the staff deeply, it is mandatory to take care of the victims [26,30-33]. Regarding that RH was not reported in this study, as we found in another study, the prevalence of RH was only 4% [24], we can only speculate that the staff in this hospital suffered this problem less. Limitations Because the study participants were self-referred and encouraged by a gift worth about 2–3 US dollars for completing the online report, the number of reported incidents might be too high. However, we found that most of the psychiatric staff did not think that the violence in psychiatry wards was severe or important enough to report [29]. Thus, this study’s strategy should be a reasonable approach to determine the level of violence on a psychiatric ward. Though the website was convenient to use and we let the participants to practice the report procedure before the study, it still presented some disadvantages. As mentioned before, some members were not comfortable using the website, and this reduced their motivation to report violence, and also would likely misrepresent staff with an age bias (older nurses being less likely to use the computer- based system). In addition, the findings of this study were limited to one hospital. It is not clear if generalizations can be made from this single study. The study focuses on characteristics of victims of assault, but it is likely that patient, administrative, and environmental characteristics have much more impact on preventive approaches. Focusing on the victim as somewhat of a “blame-the-victim” ring, and it is pretty easy to recognize that all psychiatric workers are at pretty high risk of many types of workplace violence. However, in spite of the above limitations, the study still provided empirical evidence that a high anxiety level may cause a worker to be vulnerable to violence. Reduction of the anxiety level may be