Anxiety Disorder: Specific Phobia Flashcards
Anxiety Disorder
Disorders characterised by chronic feelings of anxiety, distress, nervousness and apprehension or fear about the future, all with a negative effect
Phobias
Excessive or unreasonable fear directed towards a particular object, situation or event that causes significant distress or interferes with everyday functioning
Specific Phobia
Disorder characterised by anxiety provoked by exposure to a specific fear object or situation, often resulting in avoidance behaviour
Phobic Stimulus
The object or situation that produces the fear response
Categories of fear in the DSM
Of animals, of situations, of the natural environment, of blood/injections/injury, and other phobias
Biological Factors
Include physiological responses produced when exposed to the phobic stimulus. Often similar to a stress response.
What are the two psychological factors?
- Cognitive model
- Behavioural model
Behavioural Model
Phobias are learnt through experience and may be acquired, maintained or modified by environmental consequences such as rewards and punishment.
Classical Conditioning
A type of learning that occurs through repeated association of two or more different stimuli.
Operant Conditioning
A learning process were the likelihood of a particular behaviour occurring again is determined by its consequences
Cognitive Model
Focuses on how people process information and how people think about the phobic stimulus and related events. Operates under the key assumption that people with phobias have a cognitive bias.
Types of Cognitive Biases
- Attentional Bias
- Memory Bias
- Interpretive Biases
- Catastrophic Thinking
Attentional Bias
Notice threatening stimuli over normal stimuli
Memory Bias
Recall is far better for threatening information than for neutral information
Interpretive Bias
Tendency to interpret ambiguous situations as threatening
