What Causes Anxiety Disorders?

What Causes Anxiety Disorders?
Researchers think that the following may influence whether you develop an anxiety disorder: 

Genetics Anxiety disorders are known to run in families. 
Traumatic Events Experiencing a stressful or traumatic event, such as the death of a loved one or childhood abuse, may trigger the condition. 
Brain Structure Changes in the areas that regulate stress and anxiety may contribute to the disorder.
"There is a genetic component to anxiety disorders, no doubt," says Suma Chand, PhD, director of the cognitive behavior therapy program in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at St. Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri. 

"This tends to make the individual vulnerable to developing an anxiety disorder, rather than cause them to directly inherit one," she says. Environmental factors, she adds, interact with genetic predispositions to trigger the onset of anxiety disorders. A study published in August 2017 in the journal Emotion may offer clues as to how both genes and environment combine to make anxiety take root. 

When researchers from Pennsylvania State University in State College and Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey showed babies pictures of angry, happy, and neutral faces, they found that the infants of anxious mothers took longer to look away from the angry faces, which meant that the infants had a tendency to focus more on potential threat. 

Study author Koraly Perez-Edgar, PhD, professor of psychology at the Pennsylvania State University in University Park, says that this focus on threat may be one way that anxiety begins to take hold.

"Individuals who attend to aspects of the environment that they consider threatening can potentially create a cycle that strengthens biases toward threat, as well as toward the view that the environment is threatening, which can then lead to social withdrawal and anxiety," she says. 

"People can learn to be anxious in various situations," says Jonathan Abramowitz, PhD, professor of clinical psychology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and editor in chief of the Journal of Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders.

"This can occur through experiences in which anxiety or fear becomes associated with a specific stimulus or a stressful or traumatic event, by learning about something fearful, and through vicarious conditioning," he says.

Vicarious conditioning, says Dr. Abramowitz, occurs when you watch someone else experience a stressful and traumatic event — like food poisoning or being bitten by a dog — and come to see certain situations as dangerous.