Anxiety and the Processing of Threatening Information

Abstract

Anxiety is a ubiquitous psychological phenomenon, being part of everyday emotional experience for most people, while also being one of the most frequently encountered symptoms of neurotic disturbance. Despite this, anxiety remains difficult to define, or even to establish as a distinctive and unitary emotion. Factor analytic studies of mood state descriptors suggest that bipolar negative and positive affect dimensions emerge as orthogonal factors. Anxiety descriptors (e.g. nervous, fearful) appear to define the high negative affect pole, and are distinguished from depression by remaining neutral rather than being low on the positive affect dimension (Tellegen, 1985). On the other hand Peter Lang (e.g. 1985) and others have forcefully argued that a necessary first step should be to specify the data of anxiety; that is, the variables from which the existence of anxiety is to be inferred. These data consist not only of language-based descriptors, but also include physiological arousal measures and behavioural reactions (e.g. avoidance).