When fear does not serve survival: anxiety disorders viewed within a developmentally appropriate context

Excerpt

Fear is one of the most self-preserving emotions among living beings, enabling them to detect, predict and react to hazards (e.g., with flight or fight responses), guaranteeing survival. On a cognitive perspective, fear—and its anticipatory version, anxiety—can be sustained by a ‘better safe than sorry’ principle: when facing unknown or unclear situations, we automatically tend to estimate that fearing a potential danger is more preferable than ignoring the possible existence of some risks. Thus, the costs associated with facing an unpredicted danger are considered higher than those met for worrying about it in advance. In evolutionary terms, this assumption makes perfect sense, but what happens when anxiety or fear are pervasively elicited by unrealistic, very remote or unpreventable types of threats within a given culture and context? And what happens when this occurs to human beings still in the process of building up their resilience and coping skills, still developing their representations of the world they live in as children and adolescents? …