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CHAPTER 8 204 maintenance of psychopathological anxiety, and suggest novel ways of treating safety behavior in the context of CBT. In contrast to the assumption that safety behavior is ubiquitously deleterious, however, safety behavior that allows threat occurrences may not hamper extinction learning for certain individuals and cleaning safety behavior may not be detrimental to the beneficial effects of exposure in the context of disgust. Additionally, exposure therapy might benefit from safety behavior that motivates approach, because this promotes confrontation with the feared, but innocuous stimulus, and anxious individuals may infer safety from approach. Pathological anxiety is a severe clinical and societal problem; therefore efforts to translate the current findings to clinical applications are warranted. REFERENCES Abramowitz, J. S., Deacon, B. J., & Whiteside, S. P. (2011). Exposure therapy for anxiety: Principles and practice. New York: Guilford Press. Abramowitz, J. S., Fabricant, L. E., Taylor, S., Deacon, B. J., McKay, D., & Storch, E. A. (2014). The relevance of analogue studies for understanding obsessions and compulsions. Clinical Psychology Review, 34 , 206-217. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2014.01.004 Arntz, A., Rauner, M., & Van den Hout, M. (1995). “If I feel anxious, there must be danger”: Ex-consequentia reasoning in inferring danger in anxiety disorders. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 33 , 917-925. https://doi.org/10.1016/0005-7967( 95)00032-S Baker, A., Mystkowski, J., Culver, N., Yi, R., Mortazavi, A., & Craske, M. G. (2010). Does habituation matter? Emotional processing theory and exposure therapy for acrophobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 48 , 1139-1143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2010.07.009 Blakey, S. M., & Abramowitz, J. S. (2016). The effects of safety behaviors during exposure therapy for anxiety: Critical analysis from an inhibitory learning perspective. Clinical Psychology Review, 49, 1-15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2016.07.002