Anxiety Disorders Flashcards
- Anxiety
A general feeling of apprehension about possible danger.
Adaptive value - helps us plan and prepare for possible threat, in mild to moderate degrees.
Most of our sources of fear and anxiety are learned.
Future-oriented and diffuse than fear
Cognitive/subjective, physiological, and behavioral components
Physiology - misfiring of neurons
- Fear
A basic emotion that involves the activation of the “fight-or-flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system.
To theorists it is adaptive and allows us to escape.
- OCD
Anxiety disorder characterized by the persistent intrusion of unwanted and intrusive thoughts or distressing images; these are usually accompanied by compulsive behaviors designed to neutralize the obsessive thoughts or images or to prevent some dreaded event or situation.
- Obsessions
Persistent and recurrent intrusive thoughts, images, or impulses that a person experiences as disturbing and inappropriate but has difficulty suppressing. Examples: - Contamination fears - Fears of harming oneself or others - Lack of symmetry - Pathological doubt
- Neurotic Disorders
Psychodynamic term for anxiety-driven mental health conditions that are manifest through avoidance patterns and defensive reactions.
Freud - disorders developed when intrapsychic conflict produced significant anxiety. He believed anxiety was a sign of an inner battle or conflict between some primitive desire (from the id) and prohibitions against its expression (from the ego and superego).
- Panic Attack
A severe, intense fear response that appears to come out of the blue; it has many physical and cognitive symptoms such as fear of dying or losing control.
- Anxiety Disorders
An unrealistic, irrational fear or anxiety of disabling intensity. DSM-IV-TR recognizes seven types of anxiety disorders:
- phobic disorders (specific or social)
- panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia)
- generalized anxiety disorder
- obsessive-compulsive disorder
- posttraumatic stress disorder.
- Phobia
Persistent and disproportionate fear of some specific object or situation that presents little or no actual danger.
Three main categories of phobias: (1) specific phobia, (2)social phobia, and (3) agoraphobia.
- Specific Phobia
Strong and persistent fear recognized as excessive or unreasonable
Triggered by a specific object or situation
leads to a great deal of avoidance behavior; when confronted with a feared object, the phobic person often shows activation of the fight-or-flight response, which is also associated with panic.
- Blood-Injection-Injury Phobia
Persistent and disproportionate fear of the sight of blood or injury, or the possibility of having an injection. Afflicted persons are likely to experience a drop in blood pressure and sometimes faint.
Exhibit response characteristic of “fight-or-flight”
- Prepared Learning
The view that people are biologically prepared through evolution to more readily acquire fears of certain objects or situations that may once have posed a threat to our early ancestors. (not born in, easily acquired)
For example, people more readily develop fears of snakes and spiders if they are paired with aversive events, than they develop fears of knives or guns.
- Social Phobia
Disabling fears of one or more specific social situations
Social anxiety disorder
Fear of exposure to scrutiny and potential negative evaluation of others and to humiliation or embarrassment
- may actually experience panic attacks in social situations.
- have prominent perceptions of unpredictability and uncontrollability
- preoccupied with negative self-evaluative thoughts that tend to interfere with their ability to interact in a socially skillful fashion.
Cognitive Restructuring
Cognitive-behavioral therapy techniques that aim to change a person’s negative or unrealistic thoughts and attributions.
- Panic Disorder
Occurrence of repeated unexpected panic attacks, often accompanied by intense anxiety about having another one.
Attacks are brief but intense
13 possible symptoms of panic attacks, 10 of which are physical and 3 of which are cognitive:
(1) depersonalization (a feeling of being detached from one’s body) or derealization (a feeling that the external world is strange or unreal);
(2) fear of dying; or
(3) fear of “going crazy” or “losing control”
as many as 85% of people having a panic attack may show up repeatedly at emergency rooms or physicians’ offices for what they are convinced is a medical problem—usually cardiac, respiratory, or neurological
- Agoraphobia
Fear of being in places or situations where a panic attack may occur and from which escape would be physically difficult or psychologically embarrassing, or in which immediate help would be unavailable in the event that some mishap occurred.
- Panic Provocation Procedures (definition)
A variety of biological challenge procedures that provoke panic attacks at higher rates in people with panic disorder than in people without panic disorder.
- Anxiety Sensitivity
A personality trait involving a high level of belief that certain bodily symptoms may have harmful consequences.
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Chronic excessive worry about a number of events or activities, with no specific threat present, accompanied by at least three of the following symptoms: restlessness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension, sleep disturbance.
• Occurs more days than not for 6-month period
a relative lack of safety signals may help explain why people with GAD feel constantly tense and vigilant for possible threats
Hoarding Disorder
A new DSM-5 diagnosis characterized by long-standing difficulties discarding possessions, even those of little value.
- acquire and fail to discard many possessions that seem useless or of very limited value, in part because of the emotional attachment they develop to their possessions
- disorganization in living space interferes with daily life
- poorer prognosis for treatment than OCD
- occurs in approximately 10–40% of people with OCD
- prevalence may be 3–5% of general population
Compulsions
Overt repetitive behaviors or more covert mental acts that a person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession. Examples: - Cleaning - Checking - Repeating - Ordering/arranging - Counting
- What are the clinical features of Panic Disorder?
recurrent, unexpected panic attacks that often create a sense of stark terror
- numerous other physical symptoms of the fight-or-flight response
- panic attacks usually subside in a matter of minutes.
- many develop anxious apprehension about experiencing another attack; this apprehension is required for a diagnosis of panic disorder.
- many also develop agoraphobic avoidance of situations in which they fear that they might have an attack.
Body Dysmorphic Disorder
- obsessed with perceived or imagined flaw(s) in their appearance
- firmly believe they are disfigured or ugly
- this preoccupation is so intense that it causes clinically significant distress and impairment in social or occupational functioning.
- moved from somatoform disorders to OCD disorders because of its commonalities with OCD
- most common locations of complaints are skin, hair, nose, eyes, breasts/chest/nipples, stomach, face size/shape
- causes still being researched. There is some heritability and some issues with self-schema
Trichotillomania
- Urge to pull out hair from any body location
- Preceded by tension and followed by pleasure
- Must cause clinically significant distress
- Trichotillomania moved from impulse-control disorders to OCD-related disorders in DSM-5
- Not much is known about the disorder
- Cognitive Theory of Panic Disorder
holds that this condition may develop in people who are prone to making catastrophic misinterpretations of their bodily sensations, a tendency that may be related to preexisting high levels of anxiety sensitivity.
- Clinical Aspects of Generalized Anxiety Disorder
- chronic and excessively high levels of worry about a number of events or activities
- responds to stress with high levels of psychic and muscle tension.
- may occur in people who have had extensive experience with unpredictable or uncontrollable life events.
- seem to have danger schemas about their inability to cope with strange and dangerous situations that promote worries focused on possible future threats
- often functional deficiency in the neurotransmitter GABA, which is involved in inhibiting anxiety in stressful situations; the limbic system is the brain area most involved.
Clinical features of OCD
experiences unwanted and intrusive distressing thoughts or images that are usually accompanied by compulsive behaviors performed to neutralize those thoughts or images.
i.e. checking and cleaning rituals are most common.
evidence from genetic studies, studies of brain functioning, and psychopharmacological studies.
once this disorder begins, the anxiety-reducing qualities of the compulsive behaviors may help to maintain the disorder.
