ABSTRACT
The idea that fear and anxiety are acquired by a process of learning, most particularly by conditioning, has a long and fruitful history. It originated from Pavlov’s discovery of conditioning processes and its application to the acquisition of emotional responses. The 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 entitled, ‘A stimulus-response theory of anxiety’. Some of the key ideas were subjected to experimental analyses and later applied to clinical problems by Wolpe (1958), and incorporated into his general theory of personality by H. J. Eysenck (1957, 1967). Eysenck’s successor as Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Gray (1971, 1982, 1987) later developed an essentially psycho-physiological extension of these ideas, and introduced many novel ones. In keeping with the increasing influence 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 Beck and Emery (1985), Beck and D. A. Clark (1997), D. A. Clark and Beck (2010), D. M. Clark (1986, 1999), Salkovskis (1985, 1996a), Salkovskis et al. (1998) and Barlow (1988, 2002) have strongly influenced the way that anxiety is construed (Rachman 1996, 2009).
