Anxiety Disorder Flashcards
Specific phobias
A specific phobia involves a strong persistent and irrational fear and avoidance of a particular feared object or situation
- when exposed to the feared object or situation they experience a great anxiety or a panic reaction
To be diagnosed as suffering from a specific phobia the fear must:
- be excessive or unreasonable
- be triggered immediately
- interfere with everyday functioning
A fear becomes a phobia when is interferes with everyday life
5 sub types of phobia
- animal
- natural environment
- blood/injection/injury
- situational
- atypical
What are phobias?
Phobias are extreme fears, which are dispoportinate to the actual danger and lead to avoidance of the object or situation
Social phobia
An extreme fear of embarrassment all humiliation in social situations
- when the social anxiety interferes with work and social life it becomes clinical condition
Often the anxiety is so strong it leads to avoidance of social situations altogether
The two types of social phobias:
- social phobias for specific situation
- generalised social phobia
Agoraphobia
Agoraphobics have a particular fear of being in a public place where escape is difficult or where it would be difficult to seek help for treatment of a panic attack
It is not a specific phobia because it is not a fear but rather a fear of not being able to escape to a safe place when outside the home
There are two types of agoraphobia:
- agoraphobia as a complication of a panic attack
- agoraphobia without the panic attacks
Behaviourist explanation of phobias
The behavioural explaination of phobia involves environmental learning and conditioning
There are three theories
- classical conditioning
- The two factor theory
- social learning theory
Evaluation of the behaviourist approach
- Evidence from research
- empirical evidence comes from lab studies - lacks ecological validity
- replication of studies no succesful - not generalisable from only one study
- unpleasant expriences are not the only factor involved in phobia
- could explan specific phobia but not social and agrophobia
- maybe fears are only learned when the neutral stimulus is an accient fear ( we have an innate biological memory that certain things can harm us)
- ignores cultural differences - each society offers its own specific model that influence which phobias might be accquired
- lead to successful treatments
-behaviourist say we leaen phobias, biological say we inherit them
Psychodynamic explanation of phobias
Psychological disorders are a manifestation of repressed emotional problems
- phobias are symbols of other fears that conscious mind cannot face
- unconscious is a displaced onto not so harmful objects
Phobias are a defence against the anxiety produced by repressed ID impulses:
- it produces an impulse
- impulses is connected with anxiety
- Ego displaces this anxiety onto a more acceptable object or situation
- situation usually have a symbolic connection
- object/situation becomes the phobic stimulus
- we avoid phobic stimulus we never deal with the repressed unconscious it impulses
Evaluation of the psychodynamic explanation of the phobia
- necessary to discover the unconscious motives underlaying the phobia - difficult to directly observe
- accessing unconscious relise on interpreting symbols - highly subjective
- not scientific - unfalsifiable
- supporting evidence from the little hans case study - but not generalisable
- other approaches can offer alternatives simpler explanations for hans phobia - eg classical conditioning
- therapy that simply target symptoms of phobia are not 100% successful - fail to deal with underlying cause a phobia suggested by the psychodynamic
- exclamation of had led to the development of treatment - free association and dream analysis
