Anxiety

It separates forward-looking apprehension from other negative feelings like anger or sadness, which behave quite differently.

High scorers scan for what could go wrong and feel it in the body. Low scorers are hard to alarm and rarely rehearse disaster.

Very low anxiety with high self-consciousness is a distinctive combination: unafraid of events, but acutely sensitive to being seen.

Four public-domain statements, answered on a five-point scale. Items marked − are reverse keyed: agreeing with them counts against the trait, which is what stops agreeing with everything from producing a high score.

• +Worry about things
• +Fear for the worst
• +Am afraid of many things
• +Get stressed out easily

Four items is not many. A facet measured this way carries real uncertainty, which is why every score on this site is reported as a range rather than a single number.