ABSTRACT
Understanding anxiety disorder means understanding both anxiety and disorder as scientifi c ideas. People are anxious about many diff erent things to many diff erent degrees, but nearly everyone knows anxiety from fi rsthand experience. We speak of one another as feeling anxious, tense, nervous, afraid, worried, scared, and the like, terms we use not only to describe feelings but to explain behaviors. We say that someone did (or did not do) something because she was afraid or he was nervous. Scientists too have held that fear and anxiety, terms this paper will use as synonyms, cause many behaviors, normal and abnormal, adaptive and maladaptive. Th is anxiety theory of behavior is widely believed. But the meaning of anxiety, and its power to strongly infl uence behavior, are far from clear. Disorder is yet more diffi cult a concept in light of a dimensional alternative, the psychosocial problem.
