Anxiety response patterns: A comparison of clinical and analogue populations

A review of 41 clinical and 54 analogue studies was undertaken to evaluate the relationship between anxiety response channels—physiological, behavioral and cognitive. The results indicated that congruence among response channels tended to be higher for the clinical populations than for the analogue populations. The data tend best to support Hodgson and Rachman's (1974) theory that anxiety channel congruence increases as a function of intensity of the anxiety. Tentative support was found for Bernstein and Paul's (1971) assertion that analogue and clinical subjects are sufficiently dissimilar as to obstruct the generalization of findings from one population to the other. Lastly, the congruence patterns suggest that behavioral and cognitive measures are less reliable indices of anxiety than physiological measures, especially in analogue samples.