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1 INTRODUCTION 11 Merikangas et al., 2010; Kessler, Berglund, et al., 2005; Kessler, Chiu, Demler, & Walters, 2005). Pathological anxiety substantially reduces the quality of life (Olatunji, Cisler, & Tolin, 2007), and often follows a chronic course when left untreated (Penninx et al., 2011). Individuals with anxiety-related psychopathology expect that innocuous stimuli (e.g., situations, objects, or thoughts) will be followed by a catastrophe. For example, a patient with panic disorder may fear that dizziness will result in fainting, and a patient with OCD may expect that touching doorknobs will cause infection and illness. Patients commonly use safety behaviors in response to these perceived threats. The patient with panic disorder may quickly sit down when he feels dizzy to avoid passing out, and the patient with OCD may excessively clean her hands to counteract the expected infection. Safety behaviors are thus a transdiagnostic feature of anxiety-related psychopathology. EXPOSURE THERAPY Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), in particular, exposure-based therapy, is the treatment of first choice for anxiety disorders, OCD, PTSD, and illness anxiety disorder (Hofmann, Asnaani, Vonk, Sawyer, & Fang, 2012; Van Balkom et al., 2013). During exposure therapy, patients are repeatedly exposed to the feared, but innocuous stimulus (e.g., dizziness or doorknobs) to learn that the catastrophe that they expect (e.g., fainting or illness) does not follow or is less severe than expected, which typically decreases their fear response. Exposure therapy originated from the application of basic learning theory principles to the treatment of fear (Rachman, 2009), and can be understood in terms of Pavlovian fear conditioning. In fear conditioning terms, the feared, but innocuous stimulus is a conditional stimulus (CS), and the expected threat is an unconditional stimulus (US). The CS elicits a fear response (conditional response or CR), because it activates the representation of the US. In our previous example, the internal sensation of dizziness (CS) evokes fear