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1 INTRODUCTION 17 catastrophe. Furthermore, it remains unclear how the beneficial effects of cleaning behavior during exposure to a contaminant can be explained. Cleaning behavior prevents the occurrence of contamination and illness, and may therefore prevent extinction learning. SAFETY BEHAVIOR AND THE EXACERBATION OF ANXIETY In addition to interfering with obtaining information about perceived threats, safety behavior itself may provide information about the danger of a situation. Influential cognitive models conceptualize emotions as associative networks of network-nodes comprised of stimulus, meaning, and response information (Lang, 1977). For example, for the patient with OCD doorknobs (stimulus) may be associated with danger (meaning), and with a response that consists of the subjective experience of fear, a physiological fear response (e.g., increased heartbeat), and a behavioral fear response (e.g., avoidance; Rachman, 1990). Activation of one of the information components activates the network, and thus the other components. For example, Arntz, Rauner, and van den Hout (1995) found that anxious individuals infer danger on the basis of a subjective fear response, that is, they tend to engage in emotional reasoning: “If I feel anxious, then there must be danger”. Additionally, Ehlers, Margraf, Roth, Taylor, and Birbaumer (1988) found that patients with panic disorder infer danger from a physiological fear response. Their study showed that false feedback of an increased heart rate induces anxiety and physiological arousal in patients with panic disorder, but not in healthy controls. Safety behavior is a behavioral fear response that is aimed at preventing or escaping a feared outcome, and is therefore meaningfully linked to the perceived threat (Salkovskis, Clark, & Gelder, 1996). Hence, safety behavior may activate danger perceptions (Sloan & Telch, 2002). Indeed, Gangemi, Mancini, and van den Hout (2012), and van den Hout