ABSTRACT
Anxiety is common and highly active in the minds of those who experience it. Anxiety also has an unusually prominent cultural profile, providing a resonant language for discussing social change and disaffection. At various times, authors have staked a claim on the present era being the true ‘age of anxiety’, more anxious than the eras preceding it. Yet the significance of anxiety relative to other emotions is unclear, and, as a form of psychological dysfunction, anxiety is often overshadowed by other disorders. Anxiety disorders are more common than mood disorders, for instance, but historically mood disorders have been a more prominent target of medical treatment. In addition, evolutionary arguments position worry and apprehension in terms of the fitness advantage they confer, leading some to downgrade anxiety as natural, useful and mostly irrelevant as a facet of suffering. Philosophers, too, have positioned anxiety as a failure to accept the responsibilities of choice and free will and, therefore, as part of the human condition. And sociologists have used anxiety mostly as an explanation for social change, at once spurring action and seeking resolution. The public, too, often dismisses anxiety as a matter of character or challenge rather than accept it as a disorder. Yet there is no doubt that anxiety can be excessive, unreasonable and counterproductive. Furthermore, anxiety is often the leading edge of significant social stress. This chapter explores how anxiety has been conceived, how it differs from other emotions and what social and environmental conditions may have increased its prevalence.
