Existential Anxiety Questionnaire (EAQ) Test

People reflecting on mortality, meaning, moral responsibility, or personal direction may use this questionnaire to organize concerns that feel diffuse. The Existential Anxiety Questionnaire (EAQ) Test is designed for self-reflection by readers who want to understand their reported anxiety across existential themes. As an existential anxiety assessment, it produces a structured profile rather than reducing every concern to one undifferentiated impression.

What This Assessment Explores

It covers guilt, judgment, emptiness, meaning, fate, and death. Items include acceptance or confidence statements, while definitions connect scores with moral, spiritual, and ontic self-affirmation threats.

These four results show dimensions and bands; higher scores indicate more anxiety or distress within each theme:

• Guilt and Fear of Judgment (0-4) assesses anxiety about guilt and judgment, reflecting moral self-affirmation threat. Low 0-1; Moderate 2-3; High 4-4.
• Emptiness and Lack of Meaning (0-4) assesses anxiety about emptiness and meaning, reflecting spiritual self-affirmation threat. Low 0-1; Moderate 2-3; High 4-4.
• Fate and Death (0-5) assesses anxiety about fate, death, and finitude, reflecting ontic self-affirmation threat. Low 0-1; Moderate 2-3; High 4-5.
• Existential Anxiety (0-13) assesses overall anxiety about meaning, death, and guilt. Low 0-4; Moderate 5-9; High 10-13.

This existential anxiety test describes reported anxiety across these themes.

Methodology and Scientific Basis

Each item is a brief statement answered Yes or No. The set combines direct expressions of anxiety with statements denying worry or affirming confidence, so a Yes response cannot be treated as high or low without considering the item's wording. The questionnaire presents thematic scale results and an overall result; the displayed ranges do not reveal how many points each answer contributes.

The online questionnaire is conceptually consistent with the published EAQ described in the 2004 Weems study, the closest source for its focus on guilt, meaning, and death. Its framework also aligns with Tillich's account of existential anxiety and with the structure examined in a later study by Berman and colleagues. It has no established norms for its overall result and should not be treated as inheriting validation findings from the published samples.

As an existential anxiety scale, this questionnaire is most useful as a descriptive profile. Self-report can shift with current mood, self-awareness, and response bias. Read the bands as indicators of intensity within this questionnaire, not clinical cutoffs or a diagnosis.