Looking for trouble: A common threat‐detection mechanism underlying pain, fear, and anxiety

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.