The relation between anxious personality traits and fear generalization in healthy subjects: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: Anxious personality characteristics form a risk factor for anxiety disorders, but the mechanism remains unclear. Anxious personality could lead to greater vulnerability by increasing fear generalization. Objective: Here, we investigate if high anxious personality correlates to increased fear generalization in a meta-analysis. Methods: Our search (anxious personality & fear generalization) was performed in PubMed, PsychInfo and Embase and via snowballing. Results: N = 4895 studies were screened based on title and abstract. Twenty-three studies with data on 1303 healthy participants were included in the current study, of which 1082 participants were used in the quantitative analysis. The meta-analysis shows that there is a significant, small, positive relationship between anxious personality and fear generalization (r = .20, 95% CI [.137, .263], p < .001). No moderators of the relationship were identified. Conclusions: The meta-analysis identifies the relation between personality and fear generalization in healthy subjects, as an overall small correlation was established. This suggests that people who score high on anxious personality have a somewhat stronger tendency to generalize fear to safe or novel situations, which may explain mechanistically why these individuals are at higher risk for developing anxiety disorders.