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Abstract

The stability of the Implicit Association Test for assessing anxiety (IAT‐Anxiety) is lower than its internal consistency, indicating that the IAT‐Anxiety measures both stable and occasion‐specific variance. This suggests that the IAT‐Anxiety may be not only a valid measure of trait anxiety but also one of state anxiety. To test this assumption, two studies were conducted in which state anxiety was experimentally induced by a public speaking task. However, both studies showed that the IAT‐Anxiety score did not change when a state of anxiety was induced. Thus, it seems that occasion‐specific factors other than variations in state anxiety lead to occasion‐specific variance in the IAT‐Anxiety score. Implications for the indirect assessment of personality dispositions with the IAT are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Does the Implicit Association Test for assessing anxiety measure trait and state variance?

Abstract

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