Defining Anxiety and Comparing Anxiety to Fear

Table 8 below shows the differences in the emotion components for anxiety and fear. One major difference between fear and anxiety is the timing of the eliciting event. Fear is called post-stimulus because the eliciting event occurs first, followed by the emotion. Anxiety is called pre-stimulus because anxiety occurs before the eliciting event. Further, anxiety may or may not even have a clear eliciting event – such as when people experience generalized anxiety. Another difference are the physiological changes – fear results in SNS activation and PNS deactivation, whereas anxiety activated both the SNS and PNS system. For example, during anxiety people report an increase in heart rate (SNS system), but also feeling the need to urinate (PNS system).

Perspectives of Emotion

In general, most emotion researchers believe anxiety is not a fleeting emotion. Basic emotions researchers such as Ekman further state anxiety does not meet the requirements for a basic emotion – particularly because universal facial expressions do not exist. Social constructivists point out the cultural differences in eliciting events, symptoms, and cognitive appraisals of panic attacks, an anxiety disorder (Lewis-Fernández et al., 2010). Table 9 shows eliciting events across world regions and their corresponding term in that culture’s language. Western cultures view anxiety as caused by unexpected events, whereas other cultures view anxiety as caused by expected events (such as standing up or the weather).