This Handbook brings together and integrates comprehensively the core
approaches to fear and anxiety. Its four sections: Animal models; neural
systems; pharmacology; and clinical approaches, provide a range of
perspectives that interact to produce new light on these important and
sometimes dysfunctional emotions. Fear and anxiety are analyzed as
patterns that have evolved on the basis of their adaptive functioning in
response to threat. These patterns are stringently selected, providing
a close fit with environmental situations and events; they are highly
conservative across mammalian species, producing important similarities,
along with some systematic differences, in their human expression in
comparison to that of nonhuman mammals. These patterns are described,
with attention to both adaptive and maladaptive components, and related
to new understanding of neuroanatomic, neurotransmitter, and genetic
mechanisms. Although chapters in the volume acknowledge important
differences in views of fear and anxiety stemming from animal vs. human
research, the emphasis of the volume is on a search for an integrated
view that will facilitate the use of animal models of anxiety to predict
drug response in people; on new technologies that will enable direct
evaluation of biological mechanisms in anxiety disorders; and on
strengthening the analysis of anxiety disorders as biological phenomena.
* Integrates animal and human research on fear and anxiety
* Presents emerging and developing fields of human anxiety research
including imaging of anxiety disorders, the genetics of anxiety, the
pharmacology of anxiolysis, recent developments in classification of
anxiety disorders, linking these to animal work
* Covers basic research on innate and conditioned responses to threat
* Presents work from the major laboratories, on fear learning and
extinction
* Reviews research on an array of neurotransmitter and neuromodulator
systems related to fear and anxiety
* Compares models, and neural systems for learned versus unlearned
responses to threat
* Relates the findings to the study, diagnostics, and treatment of
anxiety disorders, the major source of mental illness in modern society
(26 % of Americans are affected by anxiety disorders!)
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