Trait Anxiety in College Students: The Role of the Approval Seeking Schema and Separation Individuation.

Mental disorders appear to be on the rise among college students and are having a significant effect on their attrition, with anxiety identified as one of the most common presenting issues. Therefore, the goal of this study was to examine the relationships between separation individuation and the early maladaptive schema of approval seeking with trait anxiety to determine their predictive utility. A sample of college students were administered Spielberger's Trait Anxiety Scale (Trait Subscale), Separation Individuation Inventory, and Young's Schema Questionnaire-Long Form 3"1 Revision. The preliminary analyses identified significant differences in trait anxiety between African Americans and European Americans, resulting in separate analyses by race. Significant positive correlations were found between separation individuation and anxiety and between approval seeking schema and anxiety for African Americans and European Americans. In addition, the regression analyses produced significant models for both groups. However, a greater amount of variance in anxiety was accounted for with European Americans, and both variables were not significant predictors of anxiety for African Americans, offering implications for future research investigating differences between African Americans and European Americans in trait anxiety.  Recent reports indicate that 11.4 percent of students attending college seek mental health help at their university counseling centers and those numbers appear to be on the rise (Grasgreen, 2011). Moreover, 62 percent of the students who resigned from college and have psychological problems cited those problems as their reason for leaving (Grasgreen, 2012). Problems with anxiety are one of the most common presenting problems that mental health practitioners encounter, including for college students. In fact, 40 percent of college students surveyed identified anxiety as their primary reason for seeking help (Grasgreen, 2011). Therefore, psychological problems, and specifically anxiety, are significant to the attrition rates of college students. Among the risk factors associated with anxiety are cognitive and developmental factors (Ozen, Ercan, Irgil, & Sigirli, 2010). The cognitive and developmental factors researched in this study were the approval seeking schema and separation individuation, respectively. The link between schemas and anxiety has been studied, but not to the extent of finding specific schemas that are related to anxiety (Calvete, Estevez, Lopez de Arroyabe, & Ruiz, 2005; Wenzel, Brendle, Kerr, Purath, & Ferraro, 2007). Therefore, one of the purposes of this study was to explore the relation between these two variables. In addition, the relation between separation individuation and anxiety was examined since an association was found between attachment styles and anxiety (Dilmac, Hamarta, & Arslan, 2009) and attachment styles and the separation individuation process (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991), but the relation between separation individuation and anxiety has not been researched. The final purpose of the current study was to determine if a cognitive factor (approval seeking schema) and a developmental factor (separation individuation) predict anxiety in college students. Trait Anxiety Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state one experiences cognitively, physically, emotionally, and behaviorally. Anxiety is a normal reaction that is experienced in the presence of a stressor, and is comprised of two main constructs: state anxiety and trait anxiety (Lau, Eley, & Stevenson, 2006). State anxiety is most often associated with an external and environmental stressor which causes a transitory state of emotions in the individual (Spielberger, 1985). Trait anxiety is a relatively stable characteristic and is described as a general predisposition to respond to a stressful stimulus (Lau, Eley, & Stevenson, 2006). …

Field of study: Education