Robin Henig has an extensive piece in today’s Sunday New York Times Magazine focused on anxiety and the work of Harvard developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan (along with many of his students who are now independent investigators).
I found the piece to be curiously anecdotal in terms of its presentation of very extensive longitudinal data–perhaps satisfying for non-scientists, but quite frustrating for those of us who want to look at actual data to prove or disprove hypotheses.
Nevertheless, the piece raises the excellent question of the extent to which the phenomenon we call anxiety is deeply linked the the limbic brain structure called the amygdala. The latest fMRI studies are at least able to provide something beyond classic psychometric tests.
Discoverers and Discoveries 