WHY BEHAVIOR ANALYSTS SHOULD STUDY EMOTION - THE EXAMPLE OF ANXIETY

Historically, anxiety has been a dominant subject in mainstream psycho logy but an incidental or even insignificant one in behavior analysis. We discuss several reasons for this discrepancy. We follow with a beh avior-analytic conceptualization of anxiety that could just as easily be applied to emotion in general. Its primary points are (a) that lang uage-able humans have an extraordinary capacity to derive relations be tween events and that it is a simple matter to show that neutral stimu li can acquire discriminative functions indirectly with no direct trai ning; (b) that private events can readily acquire discriminative funct ions; (c) that anxiety disorders seem to occur with little apparent di rect learning or that the amount of direct learning is extraordinarily out of proportion with the amount of responding; and (d) that the pri mary function of anxious behavior is experiential avoidance. We conclu de that the most interesting aspects of anxiety disorders may occur as a function of derived rather than direct relations between public eve nts and overt and private responses with avoidance functions. Implicit in this conclusion and explicit in the paper is the assertion that an xiety is a suitable subject for behavior-analytic study.