Phenomenological and Neuroscientific Perspectives on Anxiety Disorders

In this chapter, we focus on the experience of anxiety and attempt to link this to clinical neuroscience. Our central argument is that anxiety is a heterogeneous construct and that the different subjective experiences of anxiety may relate to different neurocircuitry. There are, for example, differences in the experience of anxiety that may reflect proximity to the fear stimulus (ranging from precautionary concerns and worries through anxiety and fear and, at close proximity, to imminent panic). There are also differences that may reflect different kinds of responses to the fear stimulus (e.g., fear versus avoidance) and that may reflect different kinds of fear stimuli (e.g., agoraphobia, generalized anxiety, specific anxiety, social anxiety, and posttraumatic anxiety). There is growing evidence that variations in phenomenology of anxiety are associated with different mediating neuronal circuitry.