The discrepant repressor: differentiation between low anxiety, high anxiety, and repression of anxiety by autonomic-facial-verbal patterns of behavior

Abstract

This study examined the notion that personality questionnaires can be used to predict different styles of coping with anxiety as expressed by individual differences in patterns of autonomic, verbal, and nonverbal reactions. In line with earlier modifications of the repression-sensitization concept, the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS) and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (SDS) were used to select four groups of 12 subjects each from a pool of 206 male students in Germany: low-anxious subjects (low MAS, low SDS), repressors (low MAS, high SDS), high-anxious subjects (high MAS, low SDS), and defensive high-anxious subjects (high MAS, high SDS). Several measures of autonomic arousal, facial activity, and self-reported affect were obtained during a potentially anxiety-arousing free-association task and during a number of control conditions, including a funny film. Significant differences in baseline-corrected heart rate and self-reported anxiety as well as rated facial anxiety all indicated that repressors exhibited a discrepancy between low self-reported anxiety and high heart rate and facial anxiety; low-anxious subjects reported an intermediate level of anxiety, although they showed low heart rate and facial anxiety; high-anxious subjects had consistently high values on all three variables; and the defensive high-anxious group showed an intermediate level of anxious responding. These group differences were specific to the task of freely associating to phrases of mixed (sexual, aggressive, neutral) content (but not to other experimental situations) and to self-reported anxiety (but not to other self-rated emotions or task difficult), indicating that they reflect individual differences in coping with anxiety.