McGovern H T, De Foe Alexander, Biddell Hannah, Leptourgos Pantelis, Corlett Philip, Bandara Kavindu, Hutchinson Brendan T
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.
School of Educational Psychology and Counselling, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2022 Sep 6;13:943785. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.943785. eCollection 2022.
Generalized anxiety disorder is among the world's most prevalent psychiatric disorders and often manifests as persistent and difficult to control apprehension. Despite its prevalence, there is no integrative, formal model of how anxiety and anxiety disorders arise. Here, we offer a perspective derived from the free energy principle; one that shares similarities with established constructs such as . Our account is simple: anxiety can be formalized as . A biological system, having had persistent uncertainty in its past, will expect uncertainty in its future, irrespective of whether uncertainty truly persists. Despite our account's intuitive simplicity-which can be illustrated with the mere flip of a coin-it is grounded within the free energy principle and hence situates the formation of anxiety within a broader explanatory framework of biological self-organization and self-evidencing. We conclude that, through conceptualizing anxiety within a framework of working generative models, our perspective might afford novel approaches in the clinical treatment of anxiety and its key symptoms.
广泛性焦虑症是世界上最普遍的精神疾病之一，通常表现为持续且难以控制的忧虑。尽管其发病率很高，但目前尚无关于焦虑和焦虑症如何产生的综合、正式模型。在此，我们提供一种源自自由能原理的观点；该观点与诸如……等已确立的概念有相似之处。我们的观点很简单：焦虑可以形式化为……。一个生物系统，如果在过去一直存在不确定性，那么它会预期未来也存在不确定性，无论不确定性是否真的持续存在。尽管我们的观点直观简单——仅通过抛硬币就能说明——但它基于自由能原理，因此将焦虑的形成置于生物自组织和自证的更广泛解释框架内。我们得出结论，通过在工作生成模型的框架内对焦虑进行概念化，我们的观点可能为焦虑及其关键症状的临床治疗提供新方法。
