3: Memory and Anxiety Flashcards
Give 2 general features of anxiety disorders.
Verbal rumination about negative outcomes of future events and physiological symptoms of excessive arousal.
Give 4 features of clinical anxiety.
Vigilant monitoring for potentially threatening events, active efforts to avoid and reduce impact of these, misinterpretation of stimuli as dangerous and retrieval of information that confirms negative interpretations.
Give 3 characteristics of panic disorder.
Recurrent and unexpected periods of intense fear and discomfort, many physical symptoms, and persistent concern over attacks.
Give 4 physical symptoms of panic disorder.
Palpitations, choking, shortness of breath and nausea.
Give 4 characteristics of social phobia.
Intense unpleasant arousal due to social situations, concern over behaviour being scrutinised, anticipatory anxiety and post-hoc rumination.
Describe the nature of social phobic arousal.
Can be context dependent or generalised and can cause feelings of embarrassment and humiliation.
Describe the cognitions which lead to anxiety and distress in OCD.
Persistent thoughts, impulses and images that are inappropriate and intrusive.
Describe the rituals in OCD.
Uncontrollable habits which follow obsessions in an attempt to reduce anxiety, but actually reinforce fears.
What are the two key arguments on whether OCD is an anxiety disorder?
It is characterised more by obsessions and compulsions vs. High comorbidity with, and response to similar treatment to, anxiety disorders.
Give 2 characteristics of GAD.
Experience of excessive and uncontrollable worry about a range of things and physical symptoms such as fatigue and muscle tension.
Give 4 feelings experienced in a PTSD response to an event.
Trepidation, horror, helplessness and fear.
Give 2 key characteristics of PTSD.
Post-event efforts to avoid thinking about the event and experience of intrusive memories of the event that are repetitive (e.g. flashbacks and nightmares).
What is PTSD classed as in the DSM-V?
A trauma and stressor related disorder.
Give a suggestion on why it is key to study memory biases in anxiety.
Memories are key to the experience and maintenance of a number of anxiety disorders.
What 3 things do the two original theories both predict?
Anxiety will result in enhanced memory for anxiety-relevant material, memory bias in anxiety will resemble that in depression but with different content, and hyper accessibility of threatening information.
Briefly describe autobiographical memory.
Specific and general personally experienced events within episodic memory.
What is key to prospective memory?
The future.
What is key to semantic memory?
Facts.
Briefly describe working memory.
A temporary store used in manipulation of information.
Briefly describe episodic memory.
Stores multi-modal information about past events and spatiotemporal features.
How might anxiety affect working memory?
By restricting its capacity through increased cognitive load competing with task relevant processes.
What evidence is there for and a giant working memory deficits in anxiety?
A meta-analysis shoes poorer working memory is associated with higher self-reported anxiety vs. Conflicting evidence from clinical studies.
How is hippocampus activation during episodic recall affected in anxiety?
It appears to be finished at encoding and enhanced at retrieval.
How is amygdala activation affected during episodic recall by PTSD?
It is enhanced.
What individual factor may affect memory bias?
Rumination.
Give 2 problems with studying encoding.
Anxiety may prevent memory bias by preventing material from being sufficiently elaborated and verbal stimuli may not sufficiently grab attention.
Give 2 problems with studying recall.
Nature of task is key and implicit and explicit recall must be distinguished.
What two areas could be affected by memory bias?
Problem solving and future predictions.
