Looking for trouble: A common threat‐detection mechanism underlying pain, fear, and anxiety
Mind & Language / Mind and Language
Published online on July 07, 2026
Abstract
["Mind &Language, EarlyView. ", "\nI put forward a novel cognitive architecture for pain, fear, and anxiety, according to which these three capacities are underpinned by a common threat‐detection mechanism. This mechanism takes information about potential threats as input, assesses whether the threat is actual and, if it deems it is, outputs a threat representation. If this is correct, pain, fear, and anxiety turn out to be different manifestations of the same cognitive mechanism. I defend my proposal by discussing a large swath of convergent evidence from different quarters of the sciences of the mind.\n"]