Assuming that anxiety-provoking situations can be classified in terms of types of threatening consequences, Study 1 was undertaken (1) to broadly screen threatening consequences that people expect to occur in real-life anxiety-provoking situations and (2) to develop a system to categorize those consequences. Ss were 2,176 Swedish, Hungarian, Yemenite, and Indian adolescents (aged 12, 15, and 18 yrs). The reasons given by individuals in their anxiety in daily life situations were subsumable under 11 consequence classes (e.g., separation, punishment, social embarrassment, rejection). In Study 2, this categorization system was validated, using another method for data collection and data treatment. In Study 3, Ss rated their anxiety for different kinds of verbally described, anxiety-provoking situations. A strong relationship emerged between consequence sensitivity and situational anxiety.