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Anxiety: Overview

Anxiety: Overview

Anxiety is a common mental disorder featuring excessive worry, fear, and apprehension, significantly affecting daily life. People with anxiety disorders experience persistent and intense anxiety, interrupting their everyday functioning.
Individuals with anxiety often experience a range of physical and emotional symptoms, including sweating, trembling, tachycardia, and disturbances in sleep patterns. These symptoms vary in intensity and frequency but are generally disruptive and distressing.

Surveys

Surveys

Often, psychologists develop surveys as a means of gathering data. Surveys are lists of questions to be answered by research participants, and can be delivered as paper-and-pencil questionnaires, administered electronically, or conducted verbally. Generally, the survey itself can be completed in a short time, and the ease of administering a survey makes it easy to collect data from a large number of people.

Naturalistic Observations

Naturalistic Observations

If you want to understand how behavior occurs, one of the best ways to gain information is to simply observe the behavior in its natural context. However, people might change their behavior in unexpected ways if they know they are being observed. How do researchers obtain accurate information when people tend to hide their natural behavior? As an example, imagine that your professor asks everyone in your class to raise their hand if they always wash their hands after using the restroom. Chances...

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a chronic condition characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry that persists for at least six months, significantly interfering with daily functioning. Unlike situational anxiety, which arises in response to specific stressors, GAD often occurs without a clear cause. Individuals may experience disproportionate worry about work, health, or relationships. For instance, a person might continuously fear poor health despite normal medical evaluations or...

Social Anxiety Disorder

Social Anxiety Disorder

Social anxiety disorder, also known as social phobia, is characterized by an intense fear of social situations where one might face humiliation, rejection, embarrassment, or negative evaluation. This disorder leads individuals to avoid activities like casual conversations, public speaking, or seemingly simple tasks such as eating, signing documents, or swimming, in public settings. Its impact extends beyond discomfort, often significantly interfering with daily functioning and quality of life.

Preparedness and Phobias

Preparedness and Phobias

Human fear responses to certain stimuli, such as darkness, heights, deep water, and blood, can often arise despite the absence of direct negative experiences. This phenomenon is rooted in evolutionary psychology, which posits that humans have developed a predisposition to fear stimuli that historically posed significant survival threats. This predisposition, known as preparedness, suggests that early humans who developed a fear of potentially dangerous entities, such as venomous snakes and...

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 6, 2025

The Successive Alleys Test of Anxiety in Mice and Rats

The Successive Alleys Test of Anxiety in Mice and Rats

Published on: June 17, 2013

Tracking Population-Level Anxiety Using Search Engine Data: Ecological Study.

Barnabas James Gilbert¹, Chunling Lu², Elad Yom-Tov³

¹Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.

JMIR Formative Research

|March 22, 2023

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Internet search data reveals stable anxiety themes globally, with personal concerns like jobs and family being most common. COVID-19 emerged as a major theme in 2020, highlighting search data

Keywords:

Bing search Google trends anxiety disorders anxiety themes country-level epidemiology internet search data mental disorder search engine socioeconomic

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Last Updated: Aug 6, 2025

The Successive Alleys Test of Anxiety in Mice and Rats

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Published on: June 17, 2013

Use of the Open Field Maze to Measure Locomotor and Anxiety-like Behavior in Mice

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Published on: February 6, 2015

Using the Threat Probability Task to Assess Anxiety and Fear During Uncertain and Certain Threat

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Published on: September 12, 2014

Area of Science:

Mental Health Research
Computational Social Science
Global Health Trends

Background:

Anxiety disorders are a leading global mental health concern, significantly impacting quality of life.
Prevalence has risen post-COVID-19 and may be further influenced by economic instability.
Understanding evolving anxiety themes is vital for effective prevention and treatment.

Purpose of the Study:

To analyze trends in anxiety-related search themes across 50 populous countries from 2004-2020.
To employ a novel search-based methodology over an extended period and diverse countries.
To investigate the relationship between socioeconomic factors and anxiety themes.

Main Methods:

Utilized crowdsourced questionnaires, Bing search data, and Google Trends for 50 countries (2004-2020).
Analyzed theme interactions and socioeconomic associations using time-series linear models.
Study approved by Microsoft Research Institutional Review Board.

Main Results:

Anxiety search themes showed high stability (Spearman r=0.89) from 2004-2019, moderately correlating with geography.
"Having kids," "pregnancy," and "job" were dominant personal themes.
In 2020, "COVID-19" became a leading theme in 27 countries; stable themes linked to lower fragile state index and higher individualism.
Shifts in dominant themes correlated with mental disorder prevalence in 30 countries.

Conclusions:

Internet search data offers a viable method for predicting country-level anxiety disorder prevalence.
This approach is particularly useful for understudied populations or when in-person surveys are impractical.
Search query analysis provides insights into public mental health concerns and their dynamics.