Narrator: This is Science Today. Anxiety is often marked by an overwhelming sense of fear or worry. But neuroscientist, Dr. Louis Gottschalk of the University of California, Irvine says there are more subtle signs.

Gottschalk: We've produced hard data to show that people who are anxious may focus on other people. Or you'd think, well if somebody volunteers "but I wasn't afraid, I'd jump from that airplane and I wasn't afraid." They didn't have to say that. And we've demonstrated that people that use denials - that may not always correlate so highly with other measures of anxiety, but it correlates pretty highly with biochemical measures.

Narrator: Gottschalk demonstrated this decades ago with the Gottschalk-Gleser scale, an international tool he co-developed to detect more than just anxiety.

Gottschalk: Hostility outward or hostility towards oneself. We developed scales for how schizophrenic somebody is, how depressed, how hopeful, how nurturing or how much human relations somebody has.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.