019968586X by Maria Miceli & Cristiano Castelfranchi

Author:Maria Miceli & Cristiano Castelfranchi [Miceli, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6.2.3 The questions of anxiety

As pointed out by Kendall and Ingram (1989, p. 36), anxiety is “closely associated with future-oriented ‘questioning’ cognitions”. In our view the most typical “questions” of anxiety and their possible answers are strictly related to either side of the need for control (Miceli and Castelfranchi 2005). The questions we are going to address correspond to the main target-threats of anxiety, and the related answers are in fact attempts to cope with anxiety. These answers do not pretend to be exhaustive of any kind of coping with anxiety. We will mainly focus on the cognitive strategies, while overlooking the behavioral ones, both those involving action at the neurophysiological level (for instance, taking a tranquillizer), and those characterized by action on the physical world (for instance, flight or counter-attack). To be more precise, as far as action is concerned, we will generally limit our treatment to its cognitive components, such as definition of the problem or analysis of the ways in which to tackle it. Moreover, we will restrict our analysis to those strategies which show the needs for perceived control (either pragmatic or epistemic) at work.

Some studies in the coping domain aim at identifying the major coping styles, according to a variety of general dimensions, such as active versus passive (Billings and Moos 1981), approach versus avoidance (Roth and Cohen 1986; Suls and Fletcher 1985), adaptive versus maladaptive (Holahan and Moos 1986; Miller et al. 1985; Parker and Brown 1982), and problem-focused versus emotion-focused (Folkman and Lazarus 1980; Billings and Moos 1984; Carver et al. 1989; Endler and Parker 1990). When the relationship between coping styles and anxiety is addressed, many studies try to identify the general kind of coping which is more typically used by anxious subjects (e.g. Dusenburg and Albee 1988; Sarason and Sarason 1981). In those cases, one has to be satisfied with simple items of sub-scales of a variety of coping inventories—”do nothing”, “try not to think about the problem”, “concentrate on what to do”, and so on—which, however suggestive, do not provide detailed information about the underlying cognitive processes. Other studies, however, address and treat specific phenomena in detail, such as the different strategies used by optimists and pessimists (Bandura 1977a; Feather 1982; Kanfer 1977; Klinger 1975; Roth and Cohen 1986; Scheier and Carver 1985; Scheier et al. 1986; Taylor and Brown 1988), the variety of self-handicapping strategies allowing for self-protective attributions in case of failure (Baumeister and Scher 1988; Berglas and Jones 1978; Pyszczynski and Greenberg 1983; Snyder and Wicklund 1981), or so-called defensive pessimism (Cantor and Norem 1989; Norem and Cantor 1986a, 1986b) and its function of harnessing anxiety. Actually, many of the strategic devices against anxiety we are going to describe have been already identified and examined in some way in the literature. Our particular contribution just lies in the attempt at organizing such strategies in terms of the specific questions raised by the threatening situation, and in pointing to the role played by the needs for control.

Finally, it

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