Philip J. Corr
University of East Anglia, UK

Personality and Control: Anxiety and the Behavioural Inhibition System

Anxiety is multidimensional and, phenomenology, it is fundamentally subjective: angst is constructed qualia. This multi-levelled nature poses a significant obstacle to the development of a viable model. One prominent approach has been the theory of the behavioural inhibition system (BIS), which in its various incarnations over the years has been seen to be responsible for regulatory processes in response to conditioned punishment and/or goal conflict. Its job is to assess risk, inhibit (or withhold) behaviour, and increment arousal, so that the organism is prepared to respond with greater behavioural vigour if/when inhibition is released in favour of a defensive reaction (e.g., fight, flight or freeze). The recently updated BIS is distributed over multiple neural processes, from limbic structures (especially the hippocampus and amygdala) to the prefrontal cortex; and now it is assigned a role in the generation of the contents of controlled processing, including conscious awareness. This presentation discusses the hierarchical nature of control processes in BIS-anxiety (viz, automatic, controlled and consciousness), and their functions are discussed in relation to the cognitive science perspective that views the brain-mind as a prediction machine: a mechanism that monitors predicted and actual state of the world and outputs error signals when a mismatch is detected.