ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the general issue of individual differences in anxiety as viewed from the cognitive perspective. It would, of course, be possible to address this issue in a number of different ways. For example, patients suffering from clinical anxiety could be compared with normal controls, or normals high in the personality dimension of trait anxiety could be compared with normals low in trait anxiety. While it might be supposed that these two approaches have little in common, this is not necessarily so. There are reasonable theoretical grounds for assuming that normals high in trait anxiety are more vulnerable to clinical anxiety than those low in trait anxiety. There is less empirical evidence relevant to this assumption than one might imagine, but such evidence as does exist tends to support it (e.g., Ingham, 1966: McKeon, Roa, & Mann, 1984).
