Point-Counterpoints: Anxiety and Social Exclusion

This article elaborates a view of anxiety as deriving from a basic human need to belong to social groups. Anxiety is seen as a pervasive and possibly an innately prepared form of distress that arises in response to actual or threatened exclusion from important social groups. The reasons groups exclude individuals (incompetence, deviance or immorality, and unattractiveness) therefore should all be linked to anxiety, and events that implicate the self as incompetent, guilty, or unattractive should create anxiety. This “exclusion theory” of anxiety can be considered a broader revision of separation anxiety theory and is distinguished from theories that base anxiety on fear of death, fear of castration, and perception of uncertainty. Current evidence from multiple sources is reviewed to show the explanatory power and utility of exclusion theory, and implications of this theory are developed in relation to culturally changing standards of sexual behavior, the motivations underlying the Oedipus complex, and the formation and functions of the self.