The interactive functioning of anxiety and depression in agonistic encounters and reconciliation

Abstract

This paper explores the well-known overlap of anxiety and depressive symptoms in mood and anxiety disorders. We suggest that the regulation of both negative and positive affects has served important adaptive functions (especially for coping with threats, losses, failures and defeats), and that in some contexts both affect systems require regulation at the same time (e.g. increased anxiety coupled with low positive affect). Here we will focus on how low positive and high negative affect in the individual experiencing losses and defeats regulates their competitive and acquisitive behaviors and in some cases may prevent, de-escalate, and possibly terminate on-going agonistic (hierarchical) encounters. When high negative affect (anxiety) and low positive affect (depression) fail to fulfill their adaptive roles, they tend to persist and often intensify. This may lead each affect control system to stimulate specific types of anxiety and depressive disorders, exhibiting features reminiscent of the original adaptive function of the behavior. Furthermore, as these different systems tend to operate in a synchronous fashion, the psychiatric syndromes they generate are often comorbid.