Structural relationships of dental anxiety, mood, and general anxiety

The aim of this study was to explore the structural relationships between d ental anxiety, mood, and general anxiety among 220 dentally anxious patient s who participated in a clinical study. A structural equation modeling anal ysis (SEM) was applied by using the LISREL program on the hypothesized late nt variables dental anxiety, mood, and general anxiety, which were measured by means of several psychometric tests. The final model showed that mood a nd general anxiety had positive factor loadings on dental anxiety. However, the impact of the general anxiety latent variable was not significant as c ompared with thr mood factor. Another finding was that the residual varianc e for the latent variable dental anxiety was 0.68, indicating that a major portion of the variance is still unexplained by the tested variables. In co nclusion, this study showed a relationship between dental anxiety, general anxiety, and mood among dentally anxious patients.