ABSTRACT
The chapter provides the two studies that, the Hebrew adaptations of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Children (STAIC) were used to evaluate relations between the trait anxiety of children and their reactions to anxiety-relevant cues in adults with whom they interacted. The effects of personality and environmental influences on state anxiety were examined in two studies. In Spielberger’s trait-state theory of anxiety, the critical personality variable involved in determining an individual’s experience of anxiety is anxiety proneness, that is, individual differences in the disposition to experience anxiety. The trait-state anxiety theory hypothesizes that persons high in A-Trait are more prone to experience elevations in A-State in stressful interpersonal situations. The children were then divided into high and low trait-anxiety groups, which were defined on the basis of STAIC scores. Baseline state anxiety was determined, and half of each group was exposed to a film presentation of an anxious model performing a task.
