Anxiety Identity Centrality Is Associated With Avoidant Coping in Anxious Adults

Background. Some have suggested that labeling oneself as having clinical anxiety may promote avoidant coping, which is associated with poor clinical outcomes. However, the construct of anxiety identity centrality (seeing one’s anxiety as relatively important to one's self-concept) has rarely been assessed, and its relationship with avoidant coping has not been investigated. Methods. In a sample of N = 1,234 trait anxious adults, we analyzed the relationship between anxiety identity centrality and situational and experiential avoidance (preregistration: https://osf.io/g8qh9/). A Bayesian ordered probit regression framework was used to model the relationships between ordinal variables. Results. As hypothesized, anxiety identity centrality showed small-to-medium positive correlations with situational (r = .42, p .001) and experiential (r = .12, p .001) avoidance. After controlling for anxiety symptom severity, anxiety identity centrality was still positively associated with situational (b = 0.34, 95% credible interval 0.22, 0.48) and experiential (b = 0.13, 95% CI 0.03, 0.28) avoidance. Limitations. The present study is cross-sectional; we cannot infer causal or temporal relationships between anxiety identity centrality and avoidant coping. Conclusions. Anxiety identity centrality is a reliable correlate of avoidant coping that can be measured with a single-item ordinal measure. Future research should investigate their causal relationship.