In attempting to construct a neuropsychology of anxiety, findings can be drawn from several related, yet often perceived as separate, domains of research, including cognitive science and neuroscience. The relatively new fields of cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience are concerned with very similar questions regarding brain–behaviour relationships as were fundamental to the older field of neuropsychology, and the neuroimaging tools central to those disciplines are no less pertinent to neuropsychology than are traditional neuropsychological test batteries or cognitive/behavioural paradigms. Thus, this review of the neuropsychological findings in anxiety disorders covers a wide array of methods that together inform knowledge of the brain mechanisms involved in the circuitry governing pathological forms of anxiety. Although often overlooked by neuroscientists studying brain function in anxiety, cognitive research over the past two decades has contributed substantially to knowledge about brain function in anxiety. A large body of work demonstrates that anxiety disorders are characterized by cognitive biases, indicating a heightened response to the possibility of threat (for review, see McNally, 1998). Attentional biases have been elicited very reliably across a variety of paradigms in which potentially threatening information is associated with greater attentional capture in individuals with anxiety disorders than in controls. The interference of this attentional capture with other cognitive processing serves as the operationalization of this bias in research studies. Furthermore, attentional biases have been found to disappear upon remission (for review, see McNally, 1998), suggesting that such biases are state-dependent. Cognitive biases have also been observed in the form of interpretation and memory biases. Across a number of different paradigms involving ambiguous stimuli that can be interpreted as threatening or neutral, anxious people choose the threatening meaning. Accruing evidence suggests that anxiety disorders are also accompanied by enhanced memory for negative or threatening information under certain conditions. These cognitive data suggest dysfunctional activation of a right hemisphere system involved in threat perception (for review, see Nitschke, Heller and Miller, 2000; see also Compton et al., 2000, 2002).