Anxiety: Measuring the Effects*

Anxiety is a deeply unpleasant emotion with a feeling of impending danger but no identifiable threat. It can be a personality tendency, an emotional state, or a syndrome; clinical anxiety occurs when the feeling becomes more severe, persistent or pervasive than normal. Work factors are important in producing anxiety especially when they interact with home, marital or leisure problems. Anxiety can be assessed by interview, formal rating scales, measure-ment of physiological and endocrine variables such as heart rate and adrenaline excretion. Anxiety is the commonest of milder psychiatric conditions and may present in many ways which the clinician should aim to detect