The Cognitive Psychophysiology of Emotion

Abstract

This chapter provides an exploration of response organization in fear and anxiety. It argues that psychophysiological responses are integral to the expression of clinical anxiety and that their activation plays a significant role in mediating other syndromal behaviors. The classic psychoanalytic view of cognition and anxiety emphasized the phenomenon of “repression,” a presumed mental mechanism through which thoughts evocative of an anxious state were prevented from entering working memory, thus permitting the patient to maintain emotional equilibrium in the face of associative or environmental prompts to affective expression. While there is little work on mood valence and memory in anxious patients, there is an increasingly large literature evaluating memory, response initiation and appraisal in nonpatient depressed subjects and in depressed patients. Generalized anxiety would appear to represent the condition of maximum associative fluidity of affective response structures.