44 COGNITIVE THEORY AND RESEARCH ON ANXIETY
Orienting Mode
Beck (1996) first proposed a cluster of schemas called the orienting mode that provides a
very rapid initial perception of a situation or stimulus. The orienting mode operates on a
matching basis such that these schemas are activated if the features of a situation match
the orienting template. The template for the orienting mode may be quite global, simply
reflecting the valence and possible personal relevance of a stimulus. That is, the orient-
ing mode may be biased toward detection of negative and personally relevant stimuli.
We would also expect that depression and anxiety may not be differentiated at the level
of the orienting mode, with an orienting negativity bias evident in both disorders.
The orienting mode operates at the preconscious, automatic level and provides an
almost instantaneous perception of negative stimuli that could represent a possible threat
to the organism’s survival. Moreover, the orienting mode is perceptually rather than
conceptually driven. It is “an early warning detection system” that identifies stimuli and
assigns an initial processing priority. Further, attentional resources will be diverted to
situations or stimuli detected by the orienting mode. Because the function of the orient-
ing mode is the basic survival of the organism, it is a very rapid, involuntary, and pre-
conscious stimulus- driven registration process. At this stage stimulus detection is global
and undifferentiated, primarily identifying the valence of stimuli (negative, positive,
neutral) and its potential personal relevance. Furthermore, the orienting mode may be
biased toward detection of emotional stimuli more generally (MacLeod, 1999). Thus in
the anxiety disorders, the orienting mode is excessively tuned toward detection of nega-
tive emotional information that will subsequently be interpreted as threatening once
the primal threat mode is activated. This preconscious attentional bias means that the
anxious person has an automatic tendency to selectively attend to negative emotional
material, thus making deactivation of the anxiety program more difficult.
Primal Threat Mode Activation
The detection of possible threat- relevant negative emotional information by the orient-
ing schemas will result in a simultaneous automatic activation of threat- related schemas
called the primal threat mode. Activation of these schemas will result in the production
of a primary threat appraisal. We use the term “primal” in this context because this
cluster of interrelated schemas is concerned with the basic evolutionary objectives of
the organism: to maximize safety and to minimize danger. For this reason the primal
threat- relevant schemas tend to be rigid, inflexible, and reflexive. They are an auto-
matic “rapid response” system that enables the immediate detection of threat so the
organism can set about maximizing safety and minimizing danger. Once activated,
the primal threat mode tends to capture most of our attentional resources and domi-
nates the information- processing system so that slower, more elaborative, and reflective
modes of thinking are blocked. That is, once activated, threat schemas become hyper-
valent and dominant, making it difficult for the anxious person to process anything but
threat. The simultaneous and immediate activation of the orienting and primal threat
schemas are evident in our previous example of the runner. Subjectively the runner
feels a sudden tension and anxiousness at hearing the dog bark. What has happened
between the dog bark and the tension is an orientation toward the sound of the dog and
the automatic primary appraisal “Could this be danger?” due to activation of primal
threat schemas.