The relations between general and specific trait anxiety tests and fear measures in three actual situations were investigated. Both types of test were administered to 76 undergraduate females early in the semester. Later, each subject was exposed to each situation, where observer's ratings, behavioral, and subjective fear measures were obtained. The results indicate that the specific tests were clearly superior to the general ones in predicting fear of snakes but only slightly superior in predicting fear of heights and darkness. It was concluded that the overall superiority of the specific measures supported the current trend toward situation specificity in personality assessment. The roles played by threat to self-esteem, the form of the general trail anxiety measure, and sensation seeking are also discussed.Most attempts to measure anxiety have begun with the assumption that it is a trait, that is, an enduring disposition of a person to act in a reliable manner in a wide variety of situations (Allport, 1937). For example, Taylor's (1953) Manifest Anxiety Scale (TMAS) was intended to measure a person's characteristic level of anxiety, or drive, which was thought to be relatively constant over time and across situations.Recently, the trait concept of anxiety has been questioned. Mischel (1968) has argued that trait tests lack predictive validity because they do not take into account the situational specificity of behavior. Spielberger (1966, 1969), Houston andHodges (1970), and Katkin (1966) have found trait anxiety (A-Trait) to be unrelated to autonomic response and performance measures in stressful situations. Spielberger, Gorsuch, and Lushene (1970) noted that his A-Trait scale (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory; STAI) predicted state anxiety (A-This report is based on a thesis submitted by the first author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree from the University of Delaware. The authors would like to thank the following students for their work as experimenters in the present study:

The study compared the predictive validity of anxiety measures based on the general trait approach and approaches that include the situation dimension in the test. The subjects were 56 male and 58 female undergraduates. The subjects were pretested with general and specific trait anxiety measures and were later exposed to three situations involving a rat, a test, and social anxiety. The results indicated that the predictive validity of the specific measures was significantly greater than that of the general measures in 7 of 32 comparisons, whereas the reverse never occurred. Other analyses showed some support for the presence of behavioral consistency; for example, the generalizability coefficient for persons across situations and response modes was about .35, but little support was found for the traditional general trait tests that purport to measure them.During the past decade there has been considerable debate in the field of personality and assessment on the relative importance of traits and situations. The traditional "trait" approach, which calls attention to enduring intrapsychic dispositions and deemphasizes the role of the environment, has been attacked on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and alternative models have been proposed. The behavioral or "situationist" approach (e.g., Kanfer & Saslow, 196S;Mischel, 1968), which has been one of the most widely accepted of these alternatives, can be characterized by an emphasis on the role of the current environment or situation in determining behavior. More recently, proponents of the interactional approach have suggested that neither trait nor situationist accounts of behavior are adequate, and that This article is based on a dissertation submitted by the first author in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree from the University of Delaware. The authors would like to thank the following students for their work as experimenters in the present study:

2 studies are reported on the relationships between general and specific tests of anxiety and behavioral and self-reported fear responses in the presence of a live snake. Ss were 35 female undergraduates in Study I and 76 in Study II. Measures of general anxiety were not predictive of fear responses, while measures of specific fear of snakes were highly predictive of such responses.

A patient with Dyke-Davidoff-Masson Syndrome had a lifelong history of spatial disorientation and visual-spatial cognitive defects demonstrated by psychological tests. We suggest that the abnormalities of behavior and test performance may be related atrophic lesions demonstrated by pneumoencephalography and computerized axial tomography. We consider several explanations to account for the lack of compensation for these cognitive defects.