Introduction to the Special Issue: Anxiety Disorders in Cross‐Cultural Perspective

摘要

This special issue explores the cross‐cultural variation in the presentation and generation of anxiety disorders. As a background review, in this Introduction, we illustrate how the cognitive theory of the generation of anxiety disorders explains how such cross‐cultural variation occurs. We first show how the “catastrophic cognitions” theory applies to panic disorder and then suggest how the “catastrophic cognitions” theory applies to all anxiety disorders—and so explains the existence of profound cultural influence on the presentation and generation of the anxiety disorders.