ABSTRACT
The idea that fear and anxiety are acquired by a process of learning, most particularly by conditioning, has a long and fruitful history. The idea can be traced back to Pavlov's original discovery of conditioning processes and their relevance to the acquisition of emotional responses. This idea was revised and developed by Watson and Rayner (1920) and Jones (1924), and subsequently elevated to a formal theory by Mowrer (1939) in his classic paper, A stimulus±response theory of anxiety. Some of the key ideas were subjected to experimental analysis and later applied to clinical circumstances by Wolpe (1958) and were incorporated (in part) by Eysenck 1957; Eysenck & Rachman, 1965; into his general theory of personality and its application to abnormal psychology. Eysenck's successor at the Institute of Psychiatry, Gray (1971, 1982, 1987) later developed an essentially psychophysiological extension of these ideas and introduced many novel ones. In keeping with the increasing in¯uence of cognitive analyses in psychology in general, the learning theory analysis of anxiety has now been expanded to include important cognitive components. In particular, the writings of Barlow (1988, 2002), Beck and Emery (1985), Beck and D A Clark (1997), D M Clark (1986, 1999), and Salkovskis (1985, 1996a), have strongly in¯uenced the way that anxiety is construed. Historical accounts of these developments are given by Kazdin (1978) and Rachman (1996).
