Muscle Tension and Effort at Self-Control During Anxiety

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Abstract
THE MUSCLES respond to voluntary control and yet, during immobility, are known to reflect levels of autonomic arousal.1,2But since muscle tension levels do not agree fully with other indices of arousal,3the question arises as to what variables other than arousal are expressed in the level of muscle tension. Balshan4found that the trait of anxiety was not related to muscle tension levels at rest but that it was related to the amount of increase in muscle tension when a normal subject was aroused by white noise. After demonstrating that this same principle applies to psychiatric patients, Goldstein5went on to show that, when trait anxiety is kept constant, both depression and psychosis in a psychiatric patient are associated with a greater muscular response to white noise. Suspecting that the muscle tension increase is not just a component of the anxiety response but is