In the most general sense, anxiety is understood as a negative emotional experience associated with a premonition of danger. The fact that anxiety, along with fear and hope, is a special, anticipatory emotion, explains its special position among other emotional phenomena.
There is a distinction between anxiety as an emotional state (situational anxiety) and as a stable feature, an individual psychological feature, manifested in the propensity to frequent and intense experiences of anxiety.
In Russian, this is usually fixed, respectively, in the terms of “anxiety” and “anxiety”, and the latter is used to denote the phenomenon as a whole. In addition, the state of anxiety is studied as a process, i.e. analyzing the stages of its occurrence, the excitation of the corresponding manifestations of the autonomic nervous system, development, and the natural change of states as the increase in anxiety and its discharge. The essential importance is attached to the individual's perception and interpretation of the quality of physiological arousal.
At the psychological level, anxiety is felt as tension, concern, anxiety, nervousness and is experienced in the form of feelings of uncertainty, helplessness, powerlessness, insecurity, loneliness, threatening failure, inability to make a decision, etc. At the physiological level, anxiety reactions are manifested in increased heart rate, increased breathing, increased minute volume of blood circulation, increased blood pressure, increased general excitability, reduced sensitivity thresholds, when previously neutral stimuli become negative emotional coloring.
A significant part of the research is devoted to the establishment of correlated dependencies between anxiety and personal, intellectual peculiarities, some features of perception (in particular, the perception of time intervals) [6], as well as gender, nationality and race of children, parameters of social and school environment, etc. Basically, these correlations are often quite controversial and reveal a connection with cultural and social conditions, which serves as an additional argument for researchers in favor of ideas about the predominantly personal, social nature of anxiety.
The literature also focuses on specific, private types of anxiety in children: school anxiety.
Significant problems are associated with the relationship between anxiety (“anxiety”) and fear. Until then, everything that we consider to be anxiety and fear today was described and discussed under the general concept of “fear” (which is often the case today).
In addition, there has recently been a tendency to understand anxiety as a multi-purpose experience, where many objects are threatening, in fact all sides of a multivariate and uncertain reality. When an alarm is fixed at an object, all others are freed from it. This is how fear arises. In our opinion, such an understanding refers not so much to anxiety and fear as to the ratio of general anxiety and its specific types, in which the identification of the sphere of objects and situations is required by definition (school, test anxiety, etc.).
Thus, personal anxiety is a stable experience of emotional discomfort associated with anticipation of dysfunction, with a feeling of imminent danger in objectively neutral situations that do not contain a threat to the individual.
There is a distinction between anxiety as an emotional state and as a stable property, personality trait or temperament. In the domestic psychological literature, this distinction is recorded in the concepts of “anxiety” and “anxiety”, respectively. The latter term, in addition, is also used to denote the phenomenon as a whole.
The question of the causes of personal anxiety is among the most significant, most studied and, at the same time, most controversial.
In domestic psychology, research on this problem is quite rare and is scattered and fragmented. To a large extent, this seems to be due to well-known social reasons — conditions that did not encourage the analysis of phenomena that reflect a person's perception of the surrounding reality as threatening and unstable. In the last decade, the interest of Russian psychologists in the study of anxiety has increased significantly due to dramatic changes in the life of society, which give rise to uncertainty and unpredictability of the future and, as a consequence, the experience of emotional tension, anxiety and anxiety.
e same time, it should be noted that even nowadays in our country anxiety is studied mainly within the narrow framework of specific, applied problems (school, exam, competitive anxiety, anxiety of operators, test pilots, athletes, psychotherapy, etc.)