ABSTRACT
The opening quotation was taken from a colleague’s lecture on the mechanisms of psychotherapy to highlight a theme of this chapter-the role of learning in the development and treatment of mental disorder. An idea that has emerged from the behavioral genetic literature on the anxiety disorders is that different learning processes are a significant source of shared and nonshared environmental influences. This idea is the result of the clinical treatment literature showing that behavioral therapies are among the most effective means to treat these disorders (e.g., Nathan & Gorman, 2002) coupled with the fact that many of the anxiety disorders have been consistently shown to be among the most influenced by shared (c2) and nonshared (e2) environmental factors of the common disorders.
