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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jan 7, 2026

A Novel Pavlovian Fear Conditioning Paradigm to Study Freezing and Flight Behavior
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Conceptualization and Measurement of Anxious Freezing.

Maya A Marder1, Corey Richier1, Gregory A Miller1,2

  • 1University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA.

Assessment
|December 30, 2025
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Summary

Passive freeze behavior, an innate threat response, involves physical and psychological aspects. New research introduces the Anxious Freezing Questionnaire (AFQ) to measure these dimensions and their link to trauma.

Keywords:
anxietyanxious freezingpsychopathologythreat processing

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Area of Science:

  • Psychology
  • Clinical Psychology
  • Anxiety Research

Background:

  • Passive freeze behavior is an innate threat response, often studied for physical manifestations like tonic immobility.
  • Psychological aspects, including cognitive freezing and threat evaluation, are less understood but significant.
  • Existing research lacks a comprehensive measure for the multifaceted nature of freezing responses.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To explore dimensions of freezing behavior, contexts eliciting it, and its relation to internalizing symptoms and trauma.
  • To develop and validate the Anxious Freezing Questionnaire (AFQ) for measuring individual differences in freezing.
  • To investigate the association between traumatic experiences and anxious freezing.

Main Methods:

  • Developed the Anxious Freezing Questionnaire (AFQ) through scale development best practices.
  • Utilized university samples (N = 653, 447, 590) for scale validation.
  • Examined reliability, validity, and correlations with other anxiety scales.

Main Results:

  • A three-factor solution emerged: physical freezing, cognitive freezing, and threat evaluation, demonstrating good reliability and validity.
  • Freezing episodes were significantly associated with social-evaluative and performance contexts.
  • Previous traumatic events strongly correlated with higher levels of anxious freezing across all measured factors.

Conclusions:

  • The AFQ is a promising instrument for identifying individual differences in anxiety-related freezing profiles.
  • The study highlights the importance of considering dimensional symptoms and various real-life contexts in freezing behavior.
  • Findings underscore the significant link between past trauma and heightened anxious freezing responses.