Anxiety Disorders

Question 1

How does exposure therapies work in the treatment of stress-related disorders?

Answer 1

Most effective treatment for PTSD and enables the sufferer to confront and experience events/stimuli relevant to their trauma

Question 2

How does cognitive restructuring work in the treatment of stress-related disorders?

Answer 2

Helps client to evaluate, replace intrusive or negative thoughts and change dysfunctional beliefs about the world, themselves and heir future

Question 3

What are the vulnerability factors associated with PTSD?

Answer 3

Tendency to take personal responsibility for the trauma, developmental factors such as unstable family life, a family history of PTSD, existing high levels of anxiety or a pre-existing psychopathology

Question 4

What is acute stress disorder? What is the difference between acute stress disorder and PTSD?

Answer 4

Symptoms are very similar to PTSD but the duration is shorter (3 days to 1 month after trauma exposure), can predict PTSD

Question 5

What is PTSD and what are the four groups of symptoms it entails?

Answer 5

PTSD is diagnosed only if the individual has experienced an extreme trauma prior to symptoms. Groups of the symptoms are: intrusive symptoms, avoidance responding, negative changes in cognition and mood, increased arousal and reactivity

Question 6

What are examples of trauma related to PTSD?

Answer 6

Rape, torture, prisoners of war, earthquake and flood, motor vehicle accidents

Question 7

What does CBT for OCD include?

Answer 7

Responsibility appraisal, over-importance of thoughts, exaggerated perception of threat

Question 8

What is ERP in the treatment of OCD?

Answer 8

Most common and successful treatment for OCD. Involves graded exposure to the thoughts that trigger distress, followed by the development of behaviors designed to prevent the individual’s compulsive ritual.

Question 9

What are other disorders related with OCD?

Answer 9

Body dysmorphic disorder, hoarding disorder, skin picking disorder, hair-pulling disorder

Question 10

What are obsessions?

Answer 10

Intrusive, recurring thoughts that the individual finds disturbing and uncontrollable

Question 11

What are compulsions?

Answer 11

Repetitive or ritualized behavior patterns that the individual feels driven to perform in order to prevent a negative outcome from happening

Question 12

What types of compulsions there are?

Answer 12

Checking, washing, systematic arranging of objects, compulsive hearing, superstitious ritualized movements or thoughts

Question 13

What are the characteristics of OCD?

Answer 13

Presence of obsessions and/or compulsions, the individual beliefs that they will prevent a catastrophic event from happening that has no realistic connections to the imaging event

Question 14

What does CBT for GAD include?

Answer 14

Self-monitoring, relaxation training, cognitive restructuring, behavioral rehersal, mindfulness training

Question 15

What is the role of dispositional characteristics of worries in GAD?

Answer 15

Intolerance of uncertainty, high perfectionism, mood-as-input hypothesis

Question 16

What is the role of information processing biases in GAD?

Answer 16

Attention allocated to threatening stimuli, happens to both verbal and visual stimuli, happens in conscious and unconscious levels, might cause anxiety, development of attention bias modification

Question 17

What is the best treatment for panic disorder and agoraphobia?

Answer 17

CBT (exposure based treatments, cognitive reconstructing of dysfunctional beliefs about bodily sensations), antidepressants and benzodiazepines

Question 18

What are the main features of GAD?

Answer 18

Physical symptoms of anxiety, pathological worrying is a cardiac diagnostic feature, worrying is perceived as uncontrollable by the sufferer, worrying is closely associated with catastrophizing

Question 19

What is agoraphobia?

Answer 19

Distinct fear to situations where the individual is outside, in a crowd or an open space, or in public spaces as shops, cinemas or buses without an easy escape or that help wouldn’t be available if things go wrong

Question 20

What is Clark’s model of panic disorder?

Answer 20

Panic attacks are precipitates by individuals catastrophically misinterpreting bodily sensations as threatening. People with panic disorder attend to their bodily sensations more than others, they will interpret ambiguous signs as threatening and they have panic attacks triggering mainly by the expectancy of an attack

Question 21

What is Clark’s model of the panic cycle?

Answer 21

Anxiety sensation, catastrophic beliefs about sensations, braid increase in anxiety sensations, panic attack, worrying about another panic attack

Question 22

What is panic disorder?

Answer 22

Repeated panic attacks followed by at least 1 month of worrying about further panic attacks and/or the consequences of a panic attack

Question 23

What are the symptoms of a panic attack?

Answer 23

Heart palpations, perspiring, dizziness, hyperventilation, nausea, trembling, severe apprehension, depersonalization

Question 24

What is the difference between agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder and avoidant personality disorder?

Answer 24

Agoraphobia: fear of situations without an easy escape or availability of help
Social anxiety disorder: fear of behaving in an embarrassing way or in a way that they will be evaluated negatively
Avoidant personality disorder: fears criticism, rejection and disapproval

Question 25

What is social anxiety disorder?

Answer 25

Social anxiety disorder is distinguished by a severe and persistent fear of social or performance situations. Social phobics try to avoid any kind of social situation in which they believe they may behave in an embarrassing way or in which they believe they may be negatively evaluated.

Question 26

What are the cognitive factors associated with social anxiety disorder?

Answer 26

Information and interpretation bias, interpret performance significantly more critically, show self-focussed attention, excessive post-event processing of social events

Question 27

What are common treatments for social anxiety disorder?

Answer 27

CBT (exposure therapy, social skills training, cognitive restructuring), drug treatments (MAOIs, SSRIs)

Question 28

What are some of the theories for the etiology of phobias?

Answer 28

Psychoanalytic accounts, classical conditioning, biological preparedness, non-associative fear acquisition, disgust, disease-avoidance model

Question 29

What are some of the treatments for phobias?

Answer 29

Exposure, cognitive therapy techniques, one-session rapid treatment

Question 30

What are anxiety disorders?

Answer 30

Anxiety disorders are an excessive or aroused state characterized by feelings of apprehension, uncertainty and fear. Anxiety is out of proportion to the threat posed, a state that the individual constantly finds themselves in and a cause of distress that disrupts normal day-to-day living

Question 31

What characteristics do anxiety disorders have in common?

Answer 31

Physiological symptoms of panic, biases towards selectively attending to threatening or negative information, associated with dysfunctional beliefs, often related to specific early experiences, comorbid among them