Generic Relations Between Anxiety and Fear

While there has been a great deal written about the ontogeny and function of anxiety from various perspectives, and the physiology of this emotion in respect to bodily functions, relatively little consideration has been given to a more precise definition of the characteristic components of anxiety and relations to fear. Some investigators, while agreeing that fear, for instance, exists in animals, consider anxiety to be a human trait. Liddell (7) states: “I have come to believe that anxiety accompanies intellectual activity as its shadow and that the more we know of the nature of anxiety the more we know of intellect—intellect and its shadow anxiety, are products of man's social intercourse.”

He describes the motor behavior of “neurotic” animals as chronic states of “diffuse or congealed vigilance”, despite the fact that almost identical objective manifestations in the human would be considered as denoting a pathological degree of anxiety. He adds, “I must state explicitly that in our field of investigation we do not seek to identify conditioned reflex action in mammals with intellectual activity in man nor do we feel justified in identifying the disturbed behavior of our experimentally neurotic animals with the manifestations of human anxiety. Although much behavioral data suggests that the repetitive core of human neurosis has its homologue in the experimentally neurotic sheep, in this simple animal there can be no question, operationally speaking, of a dichotomy of conscious and unconscious.”

In truth, animal reflexology and experimental neuroses give us our most basic information on anxiety. While the animal cannot tell us what is taking place, not why a conditioned fear pattern developed, it can be learned from the animal how and when the development took place. It can also reveal, for instance, that the degree of facility with which the experimental state is established depends on conditions such as constitutional factors and/or upon previously established learn