Intercorrelations between Individual Personality Factors and Anxiety.

Previous research has shown five characteristics correlate highly with anxiety and with each other; these are self-efficacy, locus of control (LOC), subjective happiness, life satisfaction, and optimism (Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2006; Park, Beehr, Han, & Grebner, 2012), but most studies have examined these factors in business professionals or undergraduate students. The present study focused on graduate students. Participants included 113 graduate students from three graduate programs who completed measures examining depression, anxiety, stress, and the five aforementioned factors. Results showed expected correlations between anxiety and other measures. Additionally, subjective happiness and life satisfaction were the only two variables correlated with all of the other variables. Results of stepwise regression analyses showed that optimism, self-efficacy, depression, and life satisfaction accounted for 64% of the variance in subjective happiness. For the life satisfaction variable, the same variables (substituting subjective happiness as a predictor for life satisfaction) accounted for 57% of the variance, but LOC also made a significant independent contribution to this 57%. Lastly, we found psychology students reported more depression and stress and less satisfaction with life, less optimism, less subjective happiness, and more internal locus of control than either occupational therapy or physical therapy students.  Anxiety is a common psychological state that can result from numerous types of daily life situations (Bateson, Brilot, & Nettle, 2011; Pedersen, 2012). Some of these situations can include work, school, family, and health-related circumstances. Depending on conditions, anxiety can be useful to individuals (Bateson, Brilot, & Nettle, 2011). This is because some anxiety can be energizing and lead to increased performance. Too much anxiety, however, can be harmful, leading to decreased behavioral performance and physiological changes. Situational factors, though, are not the only element to consider when determining if anxiety will be beneficial or not. Individual factors can influence the extent to which anxiety is harmful or beneficial. Self-efficacy is one such factor whose presence/absence can help determine whether anxiety is beneficial or harmful. Self-efficacy is a construct regarding how effective individuals believe they can be in the environment. This belief is both stable and global, and many theorists consider this construct to be a measure of competence (Bandura, 1997; Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2006). Although some theorists, including Gibbons and Weingart (2001) have broken self-efficacy down into different categories, the term self-efficacy still usually applies to the global, general self-efficacy outlined by Albert Bandura. Due to this global nature, self-efficacy has an effect on how individuals view both small decisions and major challenges (Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2006). Daily life challenges at home, work, and school can all produce anxiety (Lu, Chang, & Lai, 2011; Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2006; Pedersen, 2012). However, in all of these situations, high levels of self-efficacy can also reduce the amount of anxiety felt by individuals. Theorists have proposed different reasons for this, such as the effect self-efficacy has on appraisal of situations (Lu, Chang, & Lai, 2011) versus the effect it has on coping (Eisenbarth, 2012; Mills, Pajares, & Herron, 2006). Nonetheless, they are in agreement that there seems to be a linear relationship between levels of self-efficacy and levels of anxiety. Self-efficacy, though, is only one factor that may play a role in determining whether anxiety is helpful or not. Another factor that could impact whether anxiety is beneficial or harmful is locus of control. This factor is an indicator of how individuals attribute control in the environment around them. A high internal locus of control indicates that those individuals think they are largely in control of the environment, but a high external locus of control indicates that those individuals believe outside events or people are in control of the environment (Perrin & Teste, 2010). …

Field of study: Education