Gender differences in implicit and explicit anxiety measures

Explicit measures assess introspectively accessible self-descriptions and evaluations. In contrast, implicit measures assess introspectively inaccessible processes that operate outside of awareness. While women consistently yield higher scores on explicit anxiety measures, there are to date no studies available that examine gender differences in implicit anxiety measures. To analyse this topic, we used the Implicit Association Test (Study 1, N=248) and the Emotional Stroop task (Study 2, N=121) as implicit anxiety measures and a standard trait questionnaire as explicit anxiety measure. As expected, women scored higher on the explicit anxiety test. Women also yielded higher anxiety scores on both implicit tests. The effect sizes of the gender differences in the implicit measures were approximately half as large as those in the explicit measures. Furthermore, correlations between implicit and explicit measures were higher for women. Implications of these findings for personality assessment are discussed.