Anxiety and Related Disorders and Concealment in Sexual Minority Young Adults
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 3,350 undergraduate students at a large northeastern university enrolled in introductory psychology courses. Due to differences in the number of participants who identified as heterosexual (n = 3,193) relative to the number of participants who identified as a sexual minority (n = 157), we randomly selected a subsample of heterosexual participants (matched on age and gender to sexual minority participants) for all comparisons between sexual minority and heterosexual participants.
Symptom severity measures
Means and standard deviations for participant scores on measures of GAD, social phobia, panic disorder, PTSD, and depression are presented by gender and sexual minority status in Table 1. The overall multivariate model was significant for sexual minority status, F(4, 282) = 8.25, p = .0001, η2 = .105, and gender, F(4, 282) = 5.71, p = .0001, η2 = .075; however, the omnibus interaction between gender and sexual minority status was not significant, F(4, 282) = 1.11, p = .350, η2 = .016. Compared to men, women
Discussion
This study investigated anxiety and related disorders in sexual minority young adults. Sexual minorities reported greater dimensional symptomatology of GAD, social phobia, panic, depression and PTSD and were significantly more likely to reach a clinical level of symptoms for GAD, social phobia, and depression relative to their heterosexual counterparts. Our findings of higher symptoms and clinical levels of multiple anxiety and related disorders in sexual minority young people extends previous
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.
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