Abstract: Everyone believes that pain, fear, and anxiety are different capacities. And everyone is right. In this talk, however, I show that if we take a synoptic look at pain, fear, and anxiety, it becomes apparent that these capacities share several surprising features. I argue that the best explanation of this fact is that pain, fear, and anxiety are underpinned by a common cognitive mechanism, whose function is to detect threats. If this threat-detection mechanism collapses, so do pain, fear, and anxiety.
The talk is based on this forthcoming article:
