ABSTRACT
The two dominant approaches to understanding the origins and maintenance of acquired fear and anxiety both date back to the early part of the 20th century. Freud, and other theorists of the psychoanalytic tradition, have viewed anxiety as a signal of, and reaction to, real or imagined dangers often associated with infantile wishes. Pavlov and Watson, by contrast, viewed acquired fear and anxiety as originating out of instances of classical conditioning in which neutral cues had been paired with noxious or traumatic events. Elaborations of the behaviorist theory were made in the 1940’s and 1950’s when other theorists, (e.g., Dollard & Miller, 1950; Mowrer, 1947; Solomon & Wynne, 1954) developed avoidance conditioning models of fear and anxiety to help explain the notorious persistence of many fear/anxiety responses (see Eysenck & Rachman, 1965).
