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
Catastrophic Thinking
Thinking in which an object or situation is perceived as being more threatening than it actually is
Three types of socio-cultural factors
- Specific Environmental Triggers
- Parental Modelling
- Transmission of Threat Information
Specific Environmental Triggers
“Specific” objects or situations in the “environment” that produce or “trigger” an extreme fear response at the time.
Parental Modelling
A specific phobia can be developed through the observation and subsequent modelling of another person’s fearful behaviour.
Transmission of Threat Information
Delivery if information from any secondary source (parents, teachers, friends, media) about a potential threat of an object or situation
Cognitive and Behavioural Therapy
The combination of cognitive and behavioural therapies together to help people manage a mental health problem/disorder which involves changing thoughts an behaviours about a fear stimulus
Graduated Exposure
Replaces fear response with relaxation. Use of fear hierarchy ranks most fearful experiences to least fearful experiences which are worked through.
Flooding
Direct contact with the client’s most feared object or situation until the conditioned response (fear) is extinguished.
DSM stands for…
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
