Anxiety and the Social

A Critical Standpoint on Content-Structure related Meaning

Abstract

The study of anxiety through the lens of the social has majorly limited itself to understanding influences and consequences of anxiety. This paper examines anxiety as an emotion in psychological science, and evaluates the representation of the social in content-structure aspects of anxiety. The tendency to categorize constructs in discrete categories has long existed in Psychology. This approach has led to isolating social anxiety as a separate category from the source trait of anxiety, as seen in measures of general anxiety. The idea of conceptualizing specific anxieties such as social anxiety, separation anxiety serves a purpose in the field of psychology. However conceptualising and measuring the construct of anxiety in general has largely ignored broader aspects of an individual as a social being. A striking similarity can be inferred in the approach to categorize the experience and meaning of anxiety and the medical-pathological approach to categorize disorders. Both of which largely focuses on the physiological, cognitive and behavioral representations which are found in content of measures as well as symptoms of syndromes. This paper makes a cause for a multidimensional approach to the measuring of anxiety, with a focus on including broader aspects of the social into the content domain of general anxiety.