What is Anxiety?

Prior, Lucy A. (2024). What is Anxiety? University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

In psychology, anxiety is used as an umbrella category term to refer to three distinct phenomena: transitory episodes of anxiety (‘state anxiety’); a more stable disposition to experience these episodes (‘trait anxiety’); and the ‘anxiety disorders’. Although anxiety is widely used across psychology, our current understanding of this category is based on unsupported assumptions. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to provide a novel, interdisciplinary understanding of the psychological category of anxiety.
The prevailing view in psychology is that anxiety forms a disunified and heterogenous category. However, in Chapter 1, I reject this prevailing assumption by arguing that anxiety forms a unified kind. To do this, I argue there is a set of distinctive reliably projectable properties that can be found across the category of anxiety. In Chapter 2, I argue that the constituents of anxiety (state anxiety, trait anxiety, and the anxiety disorders) can also be categorised together in virtue of a shared biological function. This function is the detection of and response to uncertain threats in our environment. In this way, I argue that anxiety forms not only a unified kind, but a biological functional kind. In Chapter 3, I argue that anxiety is also a strong candidate for natural kindhood. However, I argue that more empirical work must be done to firmly establish anxiety as a natural kind category. While taxonomizing anxiety is key to our metaphysical understanding of it, to provide a full picture, we must also consider its constituent parts in more detail. Therefore, in Chapter 4, I turn to consider normal and abnormal episodes of anxiety. I argue that the two lay on a multidimensional spectrum and can be delineated by four independent, but often co-occurring properties. These are: how proportionate the episode is to the objective threat that has provoked it; how physically and socially disabling the episode is; how mentally manageable the episode is; and lastly, how phenomenologically intense the episode is. In Chapter 5, I introduce a sub-category of anxiety in the form of medicalized anxiety which is comprised of both abnormal episodes of anxiety and the anxiety disorders. The development of this sub-category means that in folk psychology, a dichotomy emerges between normal anxiety and medicalized anxiety. In Chapter Six, I employ corpus linguistics to analyse our expressions of normalised and medicalized anxiety. I show that, generally, we use ‘to be anxious’ to convey normalised experiences of anxiety. Contrastingly, to convey medicalized experiences, we objectify our anxiety, using the phrase ‘to have anxiety’. To conclude the thesis, in Chapter 7, I argue that while using this objectified language to describe our medicalized experiences of anxiety may be beneficial to reduce our feelings of blame, it may also stand as an obstacle to treatment and reduce our sense of agency.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):