Introduction to the special issue: anxiety disorders in cross-cultural perspective.

This special issue explores the cross-cultural variation in the presentation and generation of anxiety disorders. As a background review, in this Introduction, we illustrate how the cognitive theory of the generation of anxiety disorders explains how such cross-cultural variation occurs. We first show how the "catastrophic cognitions" theory applies to panic disorder and then suggest how the "catastrophic cognitions" theory applies to all anxiety disorders-and so explains the existence of profound cultural influence on the presentation and generation of the anxiety disorders.