Autonomy deficits as vulnerability for anxiety: evidence from two laboratory-based studies

Background: Autonomous individuals are characterized by self-governance; awareness of and capacity to realize one’s wishes and needs, while being connected with and sensitive towards others. In line with earlier research showing consistent associations between autonomy-connectedness deficits and anxiety, we tested in two studies whether autonomy deficits predict anxious responses to acute stressors.

Methods: In Study 1, participants (N?=?177) viewed an anxiety-inducing film fragment and reported anxiety before and after viewing the clip. In experimental Study 2, participants (N?=?100) were randomly allocated to one of two conditions: giving a short presentation to an audience (impromptu speech task) or watching another person’s presentation (control condition). Anxiety was measured at baseline, after a preparation period and directly after the presentation.

Results: In Study 1, individuals’ anxiety in reaction to watching the movie was positively associated with the autonomy-connectedness component sensitivity to others. In Study 2, individuals’ anxiety in reaction to preparing the presentation was negatively associated with the autonomy-connectedness component self-awareness.

Conclusions: Specific autonomy components may be related to experiencing anxiety in differing situations (i.e., related to others’ distress or presenting one’s personal views). Collectively these results indicate that autonomy-connectedness deficits may form a vulnerability factor for experiencing anxiety.     

The Effect of Self-awareness on the Identification of Goal-related Obstacles

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self-regulation. Coping with obstacles first requires those obstacles to be identified. The purpose of the present studies was to apply an inter-individual approach to this important, but insufficiently studied self-regulatory aspect of goal striving. We therefore examined the role of self-awareness, that is, paying attention to one's own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, for the identification of goal-related obstacles. We measured and manipulated self-awareness in two correlational and two experimental studies (one of them preregistered) and asked participants to identify obstacles to their goals. All studies confirmed the hypothesis that individuals with higher levels of dispositional and situational self-awareness identify more obstacles, both with regard to their idiosyncratic personal goals (Studies 1 and 2) and with regard to a goal in an assigned task during an experiment (Studies 3 and 4). The results indicate that self-awareness plays a crucial role for identifying obstacles. We discuss the implications of our findings for personality and self-regulation research.