Trait anxiety and pessimistic appraisal of risk and chance

Previous research on anxiety and risk has primarily focused on the subjective probability of negative events. Prevalent definitions, however, regard risk as having two dimensions: (i) probability and (ii) utility. Furthermore, previous results remained ambivalent to whether inflated subjective risk was due to trait or to state anxiety. Finally, response-set explanations often could not be ruled out. This article presents two studies in which risk appraisal was investigated with a new text-completion method. Participants were given texts about various possible negative and positive events with omissions for the two risk dimensions. A musical mood-induction procedure was used to induce state anxiety. The participants then completed the texts by choosing the most plausible risk descriptions. Results of both studies show a global effect of trait anxiety on the appraisal of probability and utility for both positive and negative events whereas neither state anxiety nor control variables like social desirability or depression could explain any variance in the appraisal of risk and chance.