Barlassina, L. orcid.org/0000-0002-7282-9729 (2025) Looking for trouble: A common threat-detection mechanism underlying pain, fear, and anxiety. Mind & Language. ISSN: 0268-1064
Abstract
I 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.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Authors/Creators: |
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| Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2026 The Author(s). Mind & Language published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | anxiety; cognitive architecture; fear; pain; threat |
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
| Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Nov 2025 16:44 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Jul 2026 14:51 |
| Status: | Published online |
| Publisher: | Wiley |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Identification Number: | 10.1111/mila.70021 |
| Related URLs: | |
| Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:234400 |

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