Walsh, and Wilding (1996) found that neurotic insurance salespersons
worked longer hours and closed more sales. Perhaps, dispositional anxiety
sometimes acts as a spur to achievement. The negative moods typical of the
neurotic disposition may also serve to support more systematic, substantive
decision making, depending on various moderator factors (Forgas, 1995).
Again, there is a dynamic interplay between skills, real-world behaviors,
and self-knowledge that includes motives toward self-protection, various
negative self-beliefs, and negative affect. Acquisition and execution of skills
for threat detection build a self-concept characterized by personal vulnerabil-
ity and needs for self-protection. This negative self-knowledge in turn leads to
avoidance of feared situations coupled with compensatory effort, reinforcing
these skills—but also blocking direct exposure to feared situations. Thus, at
best, the adaptation helps the anxious person to negotiate the minefield of re-
lations with people who may not be supportive or friendly. However, it also
carries risks of excessive suspicion, personal sensitivity, and hostility, which
tend to lead to interpersonal difficulties (Matthews et al., in press).
By contrast, an emotionally stable adaptation confers resilience to stress
and the capacity to profit from threatening situations. The downside of such
an adaptation may be vulnerability to complacency, and lack of preparedness
for stress. However, emotional stability typically seems to ease social adapta-
tion, perhaps because most people manage to surround themselves with more
friends than enemies. It may also support intellectual function in stressful en-
vironments, due to lack of interference from disturbing cognitions.
Contextualized Anxiety Traits
Thus far, we have focused exclusively on broad traits, such as those of the
Five Factor Model. However, dispositional vulnerability to threats is often
represented by contextualized traits that relate to a specific category of po-
tential threat. We make a brief argument here that these traits resemble
neuroticism functionally, but represent more narrowly targeted adaptations
toward specific threats. We briefly outline and compare three traits: test anxi-
ety, social anxiety, and driving anxiety. We describe their multiple expres-
sions, their impact on cognitive-adaptive skills, their relationships with self-
knowledge, and their overall adaptive functions.
Test and social anxiety are closely related constructs subsumed under the
social-evaluation anxiety domain. As such, they show a number of structural
similarities. Both test and social anxiety are associated with cognitive (i.e.,
self-preoccupation, worry, irrelevant thoughts, negative self-evaluations, low
self-esteem, and feelings of inferiority), affective (i.e., arousal, tension, dis-
comfort, somatic arousal) and behavioral components (i.e., avoidance, at-
tempts at escape) in the face of social-evaluation stress (Sarason, Sarason, &
Pierce, 1995). Indeed, research by Zeidner (1989) suggested that social anxi-
- TRAITS, STATES, AND INTELLECTUAL FUNCTIONING 155