Chapter 5: Anxiety Disorders Flashcards
Elements of Fear: Cognitive
discernment of an immediate threat to life or limb.
Specific, identifiable threat
Appraisals provoke the bodily reaction of fear
E.g. a noise coming from behind you in the dark.
Elements of Fear: Somatic Elements
body’s emergency reaction to danger
External: Physical manifestations of fear
Internal: Thoughts and brain processes in reaction to fear
Elements of Fear: Emergency Reaction
- Wherein the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system is activated.
- Causes our heart rate to increase, spleen to contract and release scores of red blood cells to carry more oxygen, adrenaline to secrete, liver to release glucose, loss of bladder and sphincter control
Elements of Fear: Emotional Elements
- Feelings of dread, panic, terror
- We are typically more conscious of these elements fear than the physiological elements.
Elements of Fear: Behavioral
- Fleeing, freezing or fighting
- Involuntary: Result of classical conditioning
3 Responses to Fear
1) Freeze
2) Fight
3) Flight
Define “Escape Responding”
Subject leaves the scene when fearful event occurs
Define “Avoidance Responding”
Subject will leave before harmful event occurs.
Define “phobia”
When the fear response is out of proportion to the amount of danger
Difference between a fear and an anxiety
-Fear is based in reality, anxiety is based on intangible danger
Define “Social Phobia”
Afraid they will act in a way that is humiliating or unacceptable and that they will end up having a panic attack
Who is most prone to a social phobia?
- Most social phobias begin in adolescence, occasionally in childhood and rarely after 25.
- More prevalent among women and poor people.
What is the prevalence rate of social phobia?
13.1% of Americans
Name three factors that cause phobia:
1) Biological
2) Neurophysiological
3) Behavioral (Pavlovian)
4) Vicarious Conditioning: Watching other people react to phobic objects
Therapies for Phobias
1) Exposure
2) Sensitization
3) Applied tension: tensing and relaxation of body
4) Biofeedback
5) Drugs: benzodiazapines (Valium), alprazolam (Xanax), monoamine oxidase inhibitors, serotonin reuptake inhibitors
DSM-IV Description of PTSD
- Confrontation with threat of death or injury responded to with horror or helplessness.
- Wide range of emotional, behavioral and somatic symptoms; reliving trauma repeatedly in dreams, flashbacks, in reverie
- Pervasive numbness and anxiety that reminds sufferer of trauma
- Person experiences symptoms of anxiety and arousal that were not present before the trauma, including sleeplessness, over-alertness, trouble concentrating, exaggerated startle and outbursts of anger
- Forgetting of important details of the event
- Less interest or participation in activities and feels detached from others, significantly impairing function
- Symptoms persist for months to decades
- Drugs are largely ineffective
- During first month, it is referred to as acute stress disorder.
Vulnerability to PTSD
- Those prior with history free of mental problems do better after a traumatic event than those with.
- High score of neuroticism and family history of mental disorders.
- Those with family members with a history of traumatic events
- Those with other past traumatic events
- The younger one is exposed to trauma
- Those trained to resist trauma experience less PTSD
- Even if good psychological health is present before a trauma, if an event is devastating enough, it can ruin one with perfect mental health.
- Lower socioeconomic and educational levels
- Physical abuse associated with a smaller corpus collosum, a tract that allows R and L brain to communicate
- Extreme stress experienced during event may lead to long-term even lifelong increase in activity of the hypothalamic-pituitary gland (HPA), which governs response to prolonged stress.
Who will not heal from PTSD?
-Those with a defeatist attitude
