IPIP-HEXACO
Anxiety
A public-domain personality facet scoring engine
Instructions: For each statement, select the response that best describes how accurately it reflects your typical behavior and attitudes. There are no right or wrong answers. Respond as honestly as possible for the most informative academic baseline.
Scale: 1 = Very Inaccurate · 2 = Moderately Inaccurate · 3 = Neither · 4 = Moderately Accurate · 5 = Very Accurate
Your Anxiety Profile
IPIP-HEXACO · Ashton, Lee & Goldberg (2007) · Public Domain
Facet Interpretation
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Academic Citation
Ashton, M. C., Lee, K., & Goldberg, L. R. (2007). The IPIP–HEXACO scales: An alternative, public-domain measure of the personality constructs in the HEXACO model. Personality and Individual Differences, 42, 1515–1526. doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.02.003
About the IPIP-HEXACO Anxiety Scale (E-Anxi)
The IPIP-HEXACO Anxiety scale (E:Anxi) is a public-domain personality instrument from the International Personality Item Pool by Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007). Anxiety is the second facet of the Emotionality dimension and measures trait-level anxiety — the stable dispositional tendency to experience worry, tension, and apprehension across diverse situations. Unlike anxiety screening instruments used in research settings, the IPIP-HEXACO Anxiety facet places anxiety on a continuous personality dimension within a broader model of emotional reactivity.
The Anxiety scale achieves a Cronbach's alpha of .85, one of the strongest in the IPIP-HEXACO battery. Items assess cognitive worry, stress reactivity, panic proneness, and rumination — targeting the cognitive rather than physical components of emotional arousal. Research by Ashton and Lee has demonstrated that this facet shows convergent validity with the STAI-T while retaining discriminant validity from Fearfulness, supporting the theoretical distinction between physical threat sensitivity and cognitive worry as two separable emotional systems within the Emotionality dimension.
Anxiety vs. State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Trait Form (STAI-T): Key Differences
| Feature | IPIP-HEXACO Anxiety (E-Anxi) | State-Trait Anxiety Inventory Trait Form (STAI-T) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Construct | Dispositional worry & cognitive tension | State and trait anxiety symptoms |
| Item Count | 10 items (IPIP-HEXACO) | 20 items (STAI-T) |
| Access | Public domain — free any use | Proprietary (PAR) |
| Alpha Reliability | .85 (Ashton et al., 2007) | ~.89–.92 (Spielberger) |
Facet Position Within the HEXACO Model
The Anxiety facet (E-Anxi) is one of four facets within the Emotionality (E) dimension of the six-factor HEXACO personality model developed by Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee. Unlike the Big Five framework, HEXACO adds a sixth dimension — Honesty-Humility — capturing variance in sincere, fair, modest, and non-materialistic behavior that the five-factor model distributes across Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. The IPIP representation of this facet, developed in collaboration with Lewis Goldberg and the International Personality Item Pool project, provides researchers with an openly licensed operationalization that achieves internal consistency (alpha = .85) comparable to the proprietary HEXACO-PI-R while remaining entirely free for academic, organizational, and educational deployment.
Research and Applied Utility
Researchers and students in personality psychology, organizational behavior, and educational research regularly use the IPIP-HEXACO facet scales as targeted instruments for hypothesis testing, survey battery supplementation, and educational self-reflection activities. Because the IPIP scales are public domain, they may be embedded in any survey platform, online tool, or research system without licensing restrictions. The Anxiety (E-Anxi) scale specifically provides a standardized academic baseline for the anxiety construct within the Emotionality domain, enabling comparison with published normative data from the Ashton, Lee, and Goldberg (2007) validation study. The scale has been applied in cross-cultural research across more than 35 countries, providing researchers with substantial normative reference material.
Frequently Asked Questions — Anxiety Scale (E-Anxi)
What is actually the difference between high trait anxiety and struggling with anxiety day-to-day?
This is one of the most important distinctions in personality psychology. Trait anxiety — what this scale measures — is a stable dispositional baseline present since early adulthood that fluctuates very little across situations. It describes how your nervous system is calibrated as a default. Anxiety-related struggles involve significant functional impairment interfering with relationships, work, or daily activities, and often involve specific triggers or avoidance patterns that go well beyond trait disposition.
Do people with high trait anxiety actually perform worse under pressure?
The relationship is more complex than most people assume. Moderately elevated trait anxiety is associated with stronger preparation behaviour, more thorough planning, and higher vigilance to errors — which often produces better outcomes in structured, high-stakes situations. What high trait anxiety does reliably predict is higher subjective distress during performance and more cognitive interference under extreme pressure. The key variable is whether the individual has effective regulation strategies available.
Is worrying all the time about things that never happen just catastrophic thinking?
Both can coexist, but they are distinct structures. High trait anxiety describes the frequency and intensity of worry as a stable baseline feature of your nervous system. Catastrophic thinking is a cognitive pattern — interpreting uncertainty as worst-case — that often accompanies high trait anxiety but can be present independently. Importantly, cognitive restructuring specifically targets the thinking pattern and shows solid evidence for reducing worry frequency even when the underlying trait disposition remains stable.
Is mindfulness actually helpful for high trait anxiety or does it just temporarily mask it?
Research on this is genuinely encouraging. Mindfulness-based approaches do not eliminate trait anxiety, but they consistently reduce the suffering associated with it by changing the relationship to anxious thoughts rather than fighting their presence. People with high trait anxiety who practise mindfulness regularly report equivalent frequency of worry thoughts but significantly reduced distress from them — a meaningful, real-world quality-of-life improvement even when trait scores remain stable.
Does this anxiety trait score replace a formal psychological evaluation?
No. The IPIP-HEXACO Anxiety scoring engine is a personality trait self-reflection worksheet for educational and academic baseline purposes only. It is not a screening tool, does not evaluate the presence or severity of any anxiety-related condition, and produces no formal conclusions about individual functioning or wellbeing. If you have concerns about anxiety in your daily life, a qualified professional is the appropriate resource for evaluation and support.