Trait anxiety, trait fear and emotionality: The perspective from non-human studies

Current clinical classifications, and many psychologists, do not distinguish categorically between anxiety and fear. Likewise, the normal language use of these and related terms suggests considerable overlap. However, ethology, behavioural pharmacology and neural analysis all suggest that anxiety and fear are fundamentally distinct at the functional and neural levels – while co-occurring and interacting with each other in many situations. As states with distinct and coherent neural control, anxiety and fear should give rise to distinct personality factors of fear-proneness and anxiety-proneness. However, additional factors are suggested by neural, epidemiological, pharmacological and genetic data, which suggest that a higher order factor of emotionality (potentially equivalent to neuroticism) will contribute to trait variance in both fear and anxiety, and a lower order factor of panic-proneness will contribute to fear, in addition to factors specific to fear or anxiety, per se.