Availability of an Avoidance Response as Related to Fear and Anxiety

directed avoidance&dquo; (Epstein, 1967). Presumably, these states need not be mutually exclusive. Fear and anxiety can occur together, with the relative contribution of each depending upon the degree to which S commits the threat-instigated arousal to a specific course of action. The present study was undertaken to test the hypothesis that anxiety is more closely associated with diffuse arousal than fear. It was assumed that indexes of physiological variability, or instability, provide a measure of diffuse arousal, as distinct from measures of basal arousal, which do not distinguish between directed and diffuse arousal. Some tentative support for a relationship between anxiety and physiological variability