Anxiety sensitivity denotes the fear of anxiety and related bodily sensations, distinguishing itself from trait anxiety by focusing more on one's own anxiety symptoms. It is strongly associated with agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorders, and PTSD. The Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI) is commonly used to measure anxiety sensitivity. Its latest version, the ASI-3, consists of three subscales: social, cognitive, and physical concerns. This scale has been found to have high reliability and validity, and has been translated into many languages. In the confirmatory factor analysis conducted during the development of the Japanese version of the ASI-3, some covariance between errors were set for both the three-factor model and the higher-order three-factor model. However, its methodological validity was questionable. In this study, a hierarchical factor model was tested by adding a general factor to the three-factor model, and its goodness of fit was compared with that of other models. Data were obtained through a questionnaire administered to 891 university students. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis indicate that the goodness of fit of the hierarchical factor model was superior to that of the three-factor and higher-order three-factor models without setting any covariance between errors. Thus, this study establishes the latent factor structure of the ASI-3 and contributes to its factorial validity.

Yoshikazu Fukui has graduated his doctoral course of Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan without PhD. He is a professor of Konan University in Kobe, Japan teaching clinical psychology. He has published more than 100 papers, given more than 800 presentation in the Congress, and translated more than 10 important books in this field. He is also a psychotherapist who uses the body oriented method such as EMDR, TFT, Ego State Therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Tapping method, and clinical hypnosis, for those suffered with complex PTSD and dissociative disorder.