anxiety

Question 1

personality

Answer 1

consistent patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving.

• individual differences in how people perceive, think and relate to their environment and themselves.
• a dynamic process rather than a set of characteristics that remain stable throughout the lifespan.

Question 2

anxiety

Answer 2

apprehension over an anticipated problem.

Question 3

fear

Answer 3

a reaction to immediate danger.

Question 4

arousal in anxiety and fear

Answer 4

• Anxiety often involves moderate arousal
• fear involves higher arousal.

a person experiencing anxiety may feel no more than restless energy and physiological tension

Question 5

anxiety and fear as adaptive

Answer 5

• Fear is fundamental for ‘fight-or-flight’ reactions — it triggers rapid changes in the sympathetic nervous system to prepare the body for escape or fighting
• Anxiety is adaptive in helping us notice and plan for future threats — that is, to increase our preparedness, to help people avoid potentially dangerous situations and to think through potential problems before they happen.
• extreme test anxiety: too much anxiety interferes with performance.
• of an inverse U-shaped curve with performance — an absence of anxiety is a problem, a little anxiety is adaptive and a lot of anxiety is detrimental.

Question 6

phobia

Answer 6

• A specific phobia is a disproportionate fear caused by a specific object or situation,
• The person recognises that the fear is excessive but still goes to great lengths to avoid the feared object or situation.
• In addition to fear, the object of a phobia may elicit intense disgust
• more common phobias are claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces) and acrophobia (fear of heights).
• Specific phobias tend to cluster around a small number of feared objects and situations
• A person with a specific phobia for one type of object or situation is very likely to have a specific phobia for a second object or situation — that is, specific phobias are highly comorbid