Introduction to anxiety sensitivity: recent findings and new directions.
Fearing anxiety feelings is a learned risk you can measure and cut with exposure and self-monitoring tools.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors pulled together every key study on anxiety sensitivity. They looked at how the fear of anxiety feelings fuels panic attacks and anxiety disorders.
They focused on people who think a fast heartbeat means a heart attack. That belief turns normal stress into full-blown panic.
What they found
High anxiety sensitivity is a clear cognitive risk factor. If you fear the feelings of fear, you are more likely to get panic attacks and anxiety disorders.
The review shows this risk is stable and measurable with simple questionnaires.
How this fits with other research
Cole (1994) gives a practical tool that matches the theory. The Anxiety Meter lets clients watch their own heart rate and learn it is safe, cutting the catastrophic beliefs Stancliffe et al. (2007) describe.
Taylor et al. (2017) go one step further. They show that when you mix CBT with PBS, kids with ASD and IDD can drop both anxiety and problem behavior fast. The theory in Stancliffe et al. (2007) explains why the kids improved: they stopped fearing their own anxiety cues.
Chan et al. (2025) shift the lens to parents. Mindfulness lowered stigma stress, but the same anxiety sensitivity process may still run in the background. Treating both parent and child anxiety sensitivity could boost outcomes.
Why it matters
You can screen for anxiety sensitivity in any intake. A quick five-item scale flags clients who treat a shaky voice or sweaty palms as danger. Add brief interoceptive exposure: run stairs, notice the heartbeat, and stay put until it drops. Pair this with R’s Anxiety Meter or Shing’s mindfulness script for parents. You turn the client’s own body into the training room, cutting panic before it starts.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
There has been a long-standing recognition that cognitive factors may play a formative role in anxiety and its disorders (Barlow, 2002). Since the 1980s, there has been great progress made in understanding the nature of cognitive risk for anxiety psychopathology. Within this context, numerous cognitive factors have been implicated and studied as potential risk factors for various anxiety conditions. Perhaps one of the most well-known and promising of these has been anxiety sensitivity (AS; Reiss & McNally,1985). AS is the fear of anxiety-related bodily sensations, which arise from beliefs that the sensations have harmful personal consequences (McNally,2002). To illustrate, people high in AS may be frightened of harmless heart palpitations because they believe the sensations will lead to cardiac arrest,whereas people low in AS do not fear these sensations because they believe them to be harmless. High AS is theorized to enhance anxious and fearful responding to internal cues through associative learning and/or cognitive misinterpretation (McNally, 2002). Numerous studies have indicated that AS is, in fact, related to increased risk of panic attacks (e.g., Hayward, Killen, Kraemer, & Taylor, 2000; Schmidt, Lerew, & Jackson, 1997, 1999) and anxiety disorders (Schmidt, Zvolensky, & Maner, 2006). Although the vast majority of work on AS has been conducted in relation to panic psychopathology (Zvolensky, Schmidt, Bernstein, & Keough, 2006), researchers
Behavior modification, 2007 · doi:10.1177/0145445506296968