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CHAPTER 6 148 contamination (Verwoerd, de Jong, Wessel, & van Hout, 2013), and social anxiety (Mansell & Clark, 1999). Emotional reasoning may be a general vulnerability factor that predisposes people to develop anxiety disorders (see Engelhard & Arntz, 2005). Longitudinal research showed that emotional reasoning shortly after trauma predicts later PTSD symptoms (Engelhard, van den Hout, Arntz, & McNally, 2002). Moreover, experimental research found that reducing emotional reasoning in spider fearful individuals reduces threat beliefs (Lommen, Engelhard, van den Hout, & Arntz, 2014). Finally, patients with anxiety disorders infer danger from information about safety behaviors. Safety behaviors are actions aimed at detecting, avoiding, escaping, or minimizing a feared outcome (e.g., Salkovskis, 1991; Deacon & Maack, 2008). Gangemi, Mancini, and van den Hout (2012) and van den Hout et al. (2014) performed vignette studies similar to the Arntz et al. (1995) and Engelhard et al. (2002) studies. Instead of information about an anxiety response versus no anxiety response, the protagonist did or did not display safety behavior. The presence of safety behaviors increased the perception of danger in patients with anxiety disorders, but not in healthy controls. This was especially so in objectively safe scenarios (Gangemi et al., 2012; van den Hout et al., 2014; see also van den Hout et al., 2016). In this study, we investigated whether anxious individuals also infer safety from approach behavior. The previously mentioned findings by Valins and Ray (1967) suggest that anxious individuals also infer safety from response information. When anxious individuals falsely believed that snake stimuli did not affect them internally (i.e., their heart rate did not increase), they showed more approach to a live snake compared to individuals who had no information about their physiological response. Research into the role of behavioral response information on safety estimations can provide further insight into the way anxious individuals make danger estimations. In turn this may increase our understanding of the beneficial effects of exposure and response prevention (ERP). ERP is a highly effective