Emotions into Disorder: Anxiety Disorders and the Social Meaning of Fear

Abstract

This article explores what we refer to as norm‐stimuli‐state discrepancies, which are disparities between people's physical‐emotional responses to emotional cues and the normative meanings of those cues. Drawing on forty qualitative interviews and participant observation research at support groups, we show that people with anxiety disorders describe two forms of norm‐stimuli‐state discrepancies. The first form involves discrepancies of type, in which people label fearful emotional states as deviant for being caused by the “wrong” stimuli. The second involves discrepancies of intensity, in which people label fearful states as deviant for involving feelings or displays of “too much” anxiety in response to an “appropriate” stimuli. The article further addresses the role of stimuli in prompting treatment seeking. Unexpected and intense emotional distress in combination with the falling away of external cues—which we refer to as “stimuli‐less fear”—serve as a critical juncture on the path to an anxiety disorder diagnosis.

The effects of expressions of fear induced by background music on reading comprehension

“…Researchers suggest that fear emerges from goal attainment (Gratch & Marsella, 2004) or anticipation of uncertain outcomes (Ortony et al, 1988). This emotion involves a series of complex appraisals of a situation in the present and future states even without stimuli being applied (Esala & Del Rosso, 2020), and can substantially influence our emotional expressions (Russell, 2017) and task performance (Choi et al, 2014). The CVT describes fear as a negatively valenced, de‐activating emotion with the potential to decrease students' involvement in a learning task (Pekrun & Perry, 2014).…”