Psychological approaches to panic disorder: a review

Panic disorder has been the subject of considerable research and controversy. Though biological conceptualizations have been predominant, psychological theorists have recently advanced conditioning, personality, and cognitive hypotheses to explain the etiology of panic disorder. The purpose of this article is to provide an empirical and conceptual analysis of these psychological hypotheses. This review covers variants of the "fear-of-fear" construal of panic disorder (i.e., Pavlovian interoceptive conditioning, catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations, anxiety sensitivity), research on predictability (i.e., expectancies) and controllability, and research on information-processing biases believed to underlie the phenomenology of panic. Suggestions for future research are made.