State-Trait Anxiety Scale: what is it and how is it used

Anxiety is part of human existence and we have all felt this emotion at some point. Although it is an adaptive response, its excess can mean psychopathology.

It must be said that, in everyday language, a more or less explicit distinction is made between what it is to be anxious and to be an anxious person. In the first case, reference is made to feeling, temporarily, anxiety, while in the second it is a characteristic of the person.

This nuance is something that the Spielberger group took into account when they elaborated the State-Trait Anxiety Scale, a tool used in clinical psychology that we will explain below.

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What is the State-Trait Anxiety Scale?

The State-Trait Anxiety Inventory or STAI, is a questionnaire that was originally developed by Charles Spielberger, R.L. Gorsuch and R.E. Lushene in the second half of the last century.

This tool consists of a questionnaire that must be answered by the patient,

answering 40 Likert-type questions in which you will indicate how anxious you feel in various situations.

The main purpose of this scale is to find out how much anxiety the patient suffers, but taking into account whether this anxiety is something characteristic of it or if it is something momentary, in response to a stressful event. High scores on this questionnaire are associated with having higher levels of anxiety.

The questionnaire has two scales, each with 20 items. On the one hand, it has the anxiety-trait scale, which allows to know to what extent the person has a personality that predisposes him to suffer anxiety symptoms (high levels of neuroticism), while on the other is the anxiety-state scale, which assesses how anxiety occurs in situations specific.

History of this inventory

Charles Spielberger, along with his colleagues R.L. Gorsuch and R.E. Lushene, developed this questionnaire, beginning in 1964 and finishing its final version in 1983. It was developed as a method to assess the two types of anxiety, understood this emotion as a trait and as a state, both in the clinical field and in research. In the first phases of the construction of this questionnaire, university samples made up of about 3,000 people were used.

Initially, this questionnaire was only going to be administered to adults without diagnosed psychopathology or who did not belong to risk groups. However, as it is useful as a diagnostic tool, especially for disorders of the anxiety and be very easy to administer, passing the sheet to the patient and letting him be the one fill in, its use in clinical psychology became widespread.

Currently, the State-Risk Anxiety Scale is among the ten most used both in clinical psychology and in research, and is usually widely used in the subjects of psychological evaluation of the faculties of psychology given its easy correction.

Anxiety-state and Anxiety-trait: How are they different?

Anxiety, in general terms, is defined as the emotional activation before a perceived element as dangerous, which makes the person start a whole series of responses to make him front, flee and avoid the possible implications and risks posed by this threat. However, as we saw before, the concept of anxiety can be defined based on whether it occurs temporarily, that is, in the form of a state, or if it is something that belongs to the personality of the individual, that is, it is a feature.

Anxiety is defined as a state when the feelings of fear, nervousness and discomfort, and the associated physiological response, in form of increased activation of the autonomic nervous system, occurs when a stimulus or situation is perceived as potentially dangerous. That is, the person feels anxious not because he necessarily has a predisposition to feel this way, but because the characteristics of the environment contribute to his responding that way. State anxiety is usually an adaptive response and ends up disappearing after the threat has been left behind.

Trait anxiety is a concept that, in terms of symptoms, does not differ much from its counterpart state anxietyOnly the origin of this emotional reaction is different. There are feelings of worry, stress and discomfort, but they are not due to a dangerous stimulus in the environment, but because the person has a personality predisposition to feel anxious, to a greater or lesser extent and more or less adaptive. The person is usually in tension, it is their day to day.

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Composition of the questionnaire

The questionnaire is made up of two scales, one measuring state anxiety and the other trait anxiety, each having 20 items and making a total of 40. The items are answered on a Likert scale, from 0 to 3. Final scores can range from 20 to 80, and the higher they are, the more anxiety the individual will manifest.

On both scales There are items that are formulated both referring to the absence of anxiety and the presence. For example, an item that is prepared based on the absence of anxiety would be "I feel safe", indicating that the higher the score for this specific item, the less anxiety the individual feels. Other items, such as "I feel worried" are made in such a way that, the higher the score, the greater the anxiety.

What disorders is it for?

The State-Trait Anxiety Scale is used, fundamentally, to detect people who have a predisposition, both genetic and environmental, to suffer from an anxiety disorder. Some of the most characteristic anxiety disorders and in which the use of this scale can allow to have a better knowledge of how the patient experiences it are obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social phobia...

However, anxiety is not uniquely something found in people with anxiety disorders. As we saw, anxiety is an emotional reaction in which symptoms of worry, tension, stress, and discomfort.

For this reason, this reaction is also detectable in other psychological conditions, such as eating disorders (ED), especially anorexia and bulimia nervosa. In these disorders, patients feel great concern about their body image, which generates a high level of discomfort. Someone touching them or referring to parts of the body that they feel dislike can activate a whole series of anxious responses also associated with phobias and other disorders of the anxiety.

Thus, Both in the field of research and in therapies for people with ED, the use of the State-Trait Anxiety Scale is widely used., allowing to know with greater precision to what extent the patient feels anxiety regarding different parts of her body and to focus the therapy towards their acceptance.

For these cases, another questionnaire is also used, called PASTAS (Physical Appearance State and Trait Anxiety Scale) which is specialized in trait anxiety and state anxiety but in different parts of the body (e.g; study by Ferrer-García et al., 2017).

How is it used?

The main advantage of the State-Risk Anxiety Scale is that it is self-administered, that is, the researcher or therapist gives the questionnaire to the patient and it is the latter who is in charge of complete it. It can be administered both individually and in groups, and there is no time limit.

Normally, people without psychopathology and in a good mood take six minutes to complete each of the two scales of the questionnaire separately and ten if it is done together. In people with an altered mood or intellectual difficulties, the questionnaire can take more than twenty minutes to complete.

During administration should avoid mentioning the word "anxiety". Although the purpose of the questionnaire is to measure this feeling, to avoid making the patient more nervous and that, therefore, this affects his answers, it is advisable to limit himself to calling it a "questionnaire of self appraisal".

Bibliographic references:

• Tilton, S. R. (2008). "Review of the state-trait anxiety inventory (STAI)". News Notes. 48 (2): 1–3.
• Spielberger, C.D.; Gorssuch, R.L.; Lushene, P.R.; Vagg, P.R.; Jacobs, G.A (1983). Manual for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Consulting Psychologists Press.
• Ferrer-García, M., Porras-Garcia, B., González-Ibáñez, C., Gracia-Blanes, M., Vilalta-Abella, F., Pla-Sanjuanelo, J.,... and Gutiérrez-Maldonado, J. (2017). Does owning a “fatter” virtual body increase body anxiety in college students? Annual Review of CyberTherapy and Telemedicine, 15, 147-153.