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6 APPROACH BEHAVIOR AS INFORMATION 157 compulsive disorder (OCD) and social phobia showed stronger safety behavior as information effects in OCD- and social phobia-relevant scenarios, respectively, than in other scenarios. However, OCD, social phobia, and panic disorder patients also inferred danger from safety behavior in other scenarios, irrespective of the content. Likewise, Arntz et al. (1995) and Engelhard et al. (2001) found that emotional reasoning was not limited to disorder-relevant scenarios. A possible explanation for these situation-general effects may be that patients with anxiety disorders report high levels of neuroticism, compared to healthy controls (Weinstock & Whisman, 2006). This reflects the fact that they tend to be anxious overall, also in situations that are not relevant to their particular disorder. Compared to other anxiety disorders, specific phobias are not associated with elevated scores on neuroticism (Trull & Sher, 1994; Mulkens, de Jong, & Merckelbach, 1996) or less (Bienvenu et al., 2001; Bienvenu et al., 2004; Weinstock & Whismann, 2006). Moreover, trait anxiety is not significantly related to emotional reasoning (Engelhard et al., 2001). Further research looking into the role of neuroticism in the tendency to infer safety from information about approach behavior is needed. Typically, the tendency to infer danger from response information has been held to have a negative impact on the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders (see Engelhard & Arntz, 2005). However, the current data suggest that the tendency to use behavior as information about danger may, in a different context, have positive results. During ERP, besides emphasizing the violation of threat expectancies (Craske, Treanor, Conway, Zbozinek, & Vervliet, 2014), it may be beneficial to stress that patients have not been avoiding, but approaching feared situations.