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Related Concept Videos

Anxiety: Overview01:18

Anxiety: Overview

320
Anxiety is a common mental disorder featuring excessive worry, fear, and apprehension, significantly affecting daily life. People with anxiety disorders experience persistent and intense anxiety, interrupting their everyday functioning.
Individuals with anxiety often experience a range of physical and emotional symptoms, including sweating, trembling, tachycardia, and disturbances in sleep patterns. These symptoms vary in intensity and frequency but are generally disruptive and distressing.
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Preparedness and Phobias01:09

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Human fear responses to certain stimuli, such as darkness, heights, deep water, and blood, can often arise despite the absence of direct negative experiences. This phenomenon is rooted in evolutionary psychology, which posits that humans have developed a predisposition to fear stimuli that historically posed significant survival threats. This predisposition, known as preparedness, suggests that early humans who developed a fear of potentially dangerous entities, such as venomous snakes and...
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Attachment is a long-standing connection or bond with others. While Attachment Theory was conceived in developmental psychology to describe infant-caregiver bonding, it's been extended into adulthood to include romantic relationships. 
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Avoidance-avoidance conflict refers to a psychological situation where a person must choose between two or more unpleasant alternatives. These conflicts are particularly stressful because neither option is desirable. This dilemma is often expressed in sayings like "caught between a rock and a hard place" or "between the devil and the deep blue sea." For instance, individuals who fear dental procedures may find themselves torn between enduring a painful toothache or facing the...
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Generalized Anxiety Disorder01:30

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Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is a chronic condition characterized by excessive and uncontrollable worry that persists for at least six months, significantly interfering with daily functioning. Unlike situational anxiety, which arises in response to specific stressors, GAD often occurs without a clear cause. Individuals may experience disproportionate worry about work, health, or relationships. For instance, a person might continuously fear poor health despite normal medical evaluations or...
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Perception is influenced by perceptual set, context, motivation, and emotion. Perceptual set, or perceptual expectancy, refers to the tendency to perceive things in a particular way, influenced by previous experiences and expectations. This phenomenon affects the interpretation of stimuli, creating a set of mental tendencies and assumptions that impact sensory perceptions of sound, taste, touch, and sight.
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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Aug 8, 2025

Using the Threat Probability Task to Assess Anxiety and Fear During Uncertain and Certain Threat
11:18

Using the Threat Probability Task to Assess Anxiety and Fear During Uncertain and Certain Threat

Published on: September 12, 2014

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Fear and anxiety differ in construal level and scope.

Lewend Mayiwar1, Fredrik Björklund2

  • 1Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway.

Cognition & Emotion
|March 6, 2023
PubMed
Summary

Anxiety involves higher-level thinking and broader scope than fear, suggesting emotions are tools for distinct challenges. Fear focuses on immediate threats, while anxiety addresses distant, unknown ones.

Keywords:
Construal levelanxietyfearpsychological distanceregulatory scope

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Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Aug 8, 2025

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Area of Science:

  • Social Psychology
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Emotion Research

Background:

  • The distinction between fear and anxiety is a long-standing debate in emotion research.
  • Understanding these differences is crucial for social-cognitive perspectives on emotion.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the fear-anxiety distinction using social-cognitive theories.
  • To examine differences in construal level and scope between fear and anxiety.

Main Methods:

  • A preregistered autobiographical recall study with 200 participants recalling fear or anxiety situations.
  • Analysis of a large dataset comprising 104,949 tweets.

Main Results:

  • Anxiety was linked to a higher level of construal compared to fear.
  • Anxiety demonstrated a more expansive scope than fear.
  • Fear was associated with a contractive scope, focusing on immediate solutions.

Conclusions:

  • Findings support emotions as adaptive tools for different types of challenges.
  • Anxiety facilitates dealing with distant, unknown threats requiring flexible solutions.
  • Fear aids in addressing immediate, concrete threats requiring direct action.