Anxiety Disorders Flashcards
How does exposure therapies work in the treatment of stress-related disorders?
Most effective treatment for PTSD and enables the sufferer to confront and experience events/stimuli relevant to their trauma
How does cognitive restructuring work in the treatment of stress-related disorders?
Helps client to evaluate, replace intrusive or negative thoughts and change dysfunctional beliefs about the world, themselves and heir future
What are the vulnerability factors associated with PTSD?
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
What is acute stress disorder? What is the difference between acute stress disorder and PTSD?
Symptoms are very similar to PTSD but the duration is shorter (3 days to 1 month after trauma exposure), can predict PTSD
What is PTSD and what are the four groups of symptoms it entails?
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
What are examples of trauma related to PTSD?
Rape, torture, prisoners of war, earthquake and flood, motor vehicle accidents
What does CBT for OCD include?
Responsibility appraisal, over-importance of thoughts, exaggerated perception of threat
What is ERP in the treatment of OCD?
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.
What are other disorders related with OCD?
Body dysmorphic disorder, hoarding disorder, skin picking disorder, hair-pulling disorder
What are obsessions?
Intrusive, recurring thoughts that the individual finds disturbing and uncontrollable
What are compulsions?
Repetitive or ritualized behavior patterns that the individual feels driven to perform in order to prevent a negative outcome from happening
What types of compulsions there are?
Checking, washing, systematic arranging of objects, compulsive hearing, superstitious ritualized movements or thoughts
What are the characteristics of OCD?
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
What does CBT for GAD include?
Self-monitoring, relaxation training, cognitive restructuring, behavioral rehersal, mindfulness training
What is the role of dispositional characteristics of worries in GAD?
Intolerance of uncertainty, high perfectionism, mood-as-input hypothesis
What is the role of information processing biases in GAD?
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
What is the best treatment for panic disorder and agoraphobia?
CBT (exposure based treatments, cognitive reconstructing of dysfunctional beliefs about bodily sensations), antidepressants and benzodiazepines
What are the main features of GAD?
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
What is agoraphobia?
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
What is Clark’s model of panic disorder?
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
What is Clark’s model of the panic cycle?
Anxiety sensation, catastrophic beliefs about sensations, braid increase in anxiety sensations, panic attack, worrying about another panic attack
What is panic disorder?
Repeated panic attacks followed by at least 1 month of worrying about further panic attacks and/or the consequences of a panic attack
What are the symptoms of a panic attack?
Heart palpations, perspiring, dizziness, hyperventilation, nausea, trembling, severe apprehension, depersonalization
What is the difference between agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder and avoidant personality disorder?
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
What is social anxiety disorder?
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.
What are the cognitive factors associated with social anxiety disorder?
Information and interpretation bias, interpret performance significantly more critically, show self-focussed attention, excessive post-event processing of social events
What are common treatments for social anxiety disorder?
CBT (exposure therapy, social skills training, cognitive restructuring), drug treatments (MAOIs, SSRIs)
What are some of the theories for the etiology of phobias?
Psychoanalytic accounts, classical conditioning, biological preparedness, non-associative fear acquisition, disgust, disease-avoidance model
What are some of the treatments for phobias?
Exposure, cognitive therapy techniques, one-session rapid treatment
What are anxiety disorders?
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
What characteristics do anxiety disorders have in common?
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
