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This paper reports one of the first investigations of adult fears. Demographic variables included: sex, race, college degree status, and sibling position for a broadly defined middle class population. Additionally, it reports a new entity, "fisity" which accounts for both the popularity and strength of a fear in a single calculated measure. Women, in general, endorsed greater overall fearfulness than men, but this differential was not observed in an all white subsample. This male-female difference is similar to trends noted in studies of children's foars. However, college degree status did not correlate with fearfulness for the total population, or for an all white male subsample; although non-degreed females did express significantly greater fearfulness than their degreed cohort. Finally, increasing birth order in the sibship also correlated with increasing fearfulness.

The paper reports the first of adult fears according to ethnicity The Chinese endorsed greater fearfulness than the whites. This difference was more marked for the women than the men. However, the Chinese and Japanese, two well-acculturated Asian minorities, expressed no differences in their and Chinese living in two different sites demonstrated only small changes in their pattern of fears. By contrast, Vietnamese "boat people" expressed greatly increased total fearfulness as well as increased fear in all individual fear categories studied, However, unlike the Chinese and whites, sex had no effect on the "boat people's" fears. These results suggest that ethnicity influences overall fearfulness and the patterns of fears held by adults. Furthermore, sex and socioenviromental factors may interact with ethnicity to modify the pattern of these fears.

Physicians, attorneys, and professors express a significantly different degree of fearfulness, although they prioritize their fears similarly. Physicians appear particularly to fear sickness and ageing, issues directly relevant to their chosen profession. The other two groups, however, do not demonstrate any specific outstanding fears. Results are discussed for a mixed sex, and an all male sample.