ABSTRACT
Anxiety as an experience has a range of somatic, cognitive and behavioural reactions: sweating, weakness, dizziness, nausea, fear of collapsing, freezing, fleeing, difficulty concentrating, restlessness and muscle tension. This chapter discusses two studies: social phobia and generalized anxiety, which underline the role of preparation and its somatic support rather than a state model of anxiety in eliciting psychosomatic distress. Social phobia is traditionally considered to be an anxiety disorder, and in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) it is not only classified amongst anxiety disorders but seen as synonymous with social anxiety. A self-protection interpersonal model makes sense of the different and fractionated response systems activated in social phobia by stepping beyond an intrapersonal model of anxiety towards a model of contextual preparation. Several psychophysiological investigators have long considered psychophysiological activation as a physiological support for behaviour, that is an element of behaviour rather than a response.
