CP: Fear and Anxiety Flashcards
What are the components of emotions?
- Expression
- Behaviour
- Appraisal
- “Feeling”
- Action tendencies
- Physiology
What is fear? What are its components?
- Immediate danger
- Basic emotion
- Very observable facial expression
What effects does fear have on the body/mind?
- Physiology - Sympathetic division
- Heart rate/Blood pressure
- Muscle tone
- Breathing
- Behaviour
- Freeze, flight, fight, fright
- Mammals typically freeze and observe, then make a decision
- Freeze, flight, fight, fright
- Cognitive/subjective
- If you are in a fearful state, it is much easier to have “hot” cognitions, meaning they are biased to danger-like interpretations
What is anxiety?
- Apprehension over an anticipated problem
- Threat in future: (Anticipatory) anxiety
- Complex emotion
- Avoidance
- Preparation
What are common features of anxiety and fear?
- Both anxiety and fear can involve arousal or sympathetic nervous system activity.
- Anxiety often involves moderate arousal, fear involves higher arousal.
- Both are adaptive, anxiety is an inverse u-shaped curve when plotted against performance
In an Anxiety disorder, what does fear have to be?
- Irrational
- Stimulus doesn’t justify the fear
- Excessively intense fear
- Excessively long duration of fear
- Distress/impairment
- Fear is very aversive
- Avoidance, safety behaviours
Is fear common in all anxiety disorders?
Are fear and anxiety exclusive to anxiety disorders?
Fear is common in anxiety disorders other than GAD
There are specific anxiety disorders, but fear and anxiety are important in many other forms of psychopathology
What are the five major anxiety disorders?
What are they about?
- Specific phobia
- Fear of objects or situations that is out of proportion to any real danger
- Social anxiety disorder
- Fear of unfamiliar people or social scrutiny
- Panic disorder
- Anxiety about recurrent panic attacks
- Agoraphobia
- Anxiety about being in places where escaping or getting help would be difficult if anxiety symptoms occurred
- Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
- Uncontrollable worry
How many specific anxiety disorders are there in the DSM-5?
(You don’t need to know all of them by heart, just understand that theres a lot of them)
- Separation anxiety disorder
- Selective mutism
- Specific phobia
- Social anxiety disorder
- Panic disorder
- Panic attack as a specifier
- Agoraphobia
- Generalized Anxiety Disorder
- Substance induced anxiety disorder
- Anxiety disorder due to another medical condition
- Other specified / unspecified anxiety disorder
How common/prevalent are anxiety disorders as a group?
Anxiety disorders as a group are the most common type of psychological disorder.
Global prevalence estimate is 26.9% for anxiety disorders
Are anxiety disorders costly/what effect on the world do they have?
- Anxiety disorders are ninth leading cause of disability worldwide
- People with Anxiety disorders have
- Twice the rate of unemployment
- Elevated risk of marital discord
- Fourfold higher risk of suicide attempts
- Higher risk of developing medical conditions
- 3/4 of people with an Anxiety disorder meet the criteria for another Psychological disorder (comorbidity)
- High comorbidity (60%) with depression
- Relapse: often different anxiety disorder
What is the lifetime prevalence of anxiety disorders in the Netherlands?
You don’t need to know specifics, just the range/general number
Panic disorder: 3.8%
Agoraphobia without panic: 0.9%
Specific phobia: 7.9%
Social anxiety disorder: 9.3%
Generalized anxiety disorder: 4.5%
Anxiety disorder (overall): 19.6%
Is there a difference between male and female prevalence?
The numbers for male and female prevalence typically follow the pattern of female prevalence being 1.5-2x higher than male prevalence (e.g. Panic disorder: Lifetime=3.8, M=2.8, F=4.8)
What are some potential explanations for this?
Focus on concepts here, not specifically the info
- Women may be more likely to report symptoms
- Social influences, such as gender roles are involved
- Men may experience more social pressure to face their fears (an excellent treatment method)
- Women experience different life circumstances; much more likely to be sexually assaulted, which interferes with sense of control over environment
- Less perceived control over one’s environment may set the stage for anxiety disorders
- Men raised to believe in their personal control over situations
- Women show higher neuroticism levels and more biological reactivity to stress.
Are anxiety disorders experienced in every culture?
People in every culture seem to experience problems with anxiety disorders, but culture and environment influence what people fear.
Cultural concepts of distress provide examples of how culture/environment shape the expression of an anxiety disorder
What is an example of a cultural-specific anxiety disorder?
- In Japan, taijin kyofusho involves fear of displeasing or embarrassing others
- Symptoms of this disorder overlap with social anxiety disorder, but the focus on others’ feelings is distinct.
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- There are other examples that I wont write out, but know usually the objects of anxiety and fear in these syndromes relate to environmental challenges as well as to attitudes that are prevalent in the culture.
Does the prevalence of anxiety disorders vary across culture?
If so, why?
- Prevalence of anxiety disorders varies dramatically across cultures, ranging from 3% to 19%.
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- This is because of the usual cultural things, like relationship nature, countries with conflicts, attitudes towards disclosing psychological symptoms.
- In some countries, cultural concepts of distress related to anxiety may be more common than Anxiety disorders, therefore showing lower prevalence’s.
What is a key factor that affects prevalence?
- One important difference is level of income inequality (the gap between highest and lowest incomes in a country)
- Countries with high levels (e.g. European countries and United states) have much higher rates of Anxiety disorders.
General anxiety disorders?
What are the influences that increase general risk for anxiety disorders?
It’s a long list, but they appear everywhere so try learn them
- Cultural and cross-national influences: exposure to war, persecution, and income inequality
- Behavioural conditioning (classical and operant conditioning)
- Genetic vulnerability
- Disturbances in the activity of the amygdala (increased), the medial prefrontal cortex (decreased), and other brain regions involved in processing fear and emotion
- Decreased functioning of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and serotonin; increased norepinephrine activity
- Increased cortisol awakening response (CAR)
- Behavioural inhibition
- Neuroticism
- Cognitive influences, including sustained negative beliefs (assisted by safety behaviours), perceived lack of control, over-attention to cues of threat, and intolerance of uncertainty
General anxiety disorders
How do genes affect etiology?
- Twin studies suggest heritability estimate of 0.5-0.6 for anxiety disorders
- Neuroticism (~40% heritable)
- Predicts both anxiety disorders and mood disorders
- How is this heritable? Isn’t neuroticism a concept? Well polygenetic, etc. blah blah
- Behavioural inhibition - Kagan
- Related to genes and temperament, its the difference in baby’s reaction to the toy
- High reactivity is related to shyness, and social anxiety
- High reactivity = vulnerable temperament
- Specific genes e.g. Panic disorder
General anxiety disorders
How does environment affect etiology?
- Positive and negative experiences (Related to perceived lack of control)
- Parent modelling
- Parenting styles
General anxiety disorders
Neurobiological correlates: What brain regions play a role in etiology?
When responding to threatening stimuli, people with anxiety disorders tend to have
- Heightened activity in the amygdala
- Diminished activity of the medial prefrontal cortex
- The pathways connecting them may be deficient
- Other brain regions are involved
- Bed nucleus of stria terminalis is engaged by cues of threats, particularly unpredictable or diffuse threats.
- Anterior cingulate cortex involved in anticipation of threat
- Insula related to awareness of and processing of bodily cues
- Hippocampus encodes the context in which feared stimuli occur
General anxiety disorders
Neurobiological correlates: What neurotransmitters play a role in etiology?
Many neurotransmitters and neuropeptides are involved, and different techniques used to identify them
- PET and SPECT imaging studies link Anxiety disorders to disruptions in serotonin levels; changes in function of GABA system.
- Drug manipulation showed that Anxiety disorders are related to increased levels of norepinephrine and changes in sensitivity of receptors.
- Other research focused on HPA axis and the size of early morning rise due to cortisol (known as cortisol awakening response, CAR).
- The CAR predicted onset of Anxiety disorders over the next 6 years.
General anxiety disorders
What is the main model used for fear conditioning?
Mowrer’s two factor model of anxiety influences thinking in this area.
It suggests two steps in the development of an anxiety disorder
- Etiology: classical conditioning (little albert)
- very important paradigm in studying fear
- Maintenance: operant conditioning
- Reinforcement of avoidance
- Neurotic paradox
- Short term advantage: fear lessens temporarily
- Long term disadvantage: pathology maintained/grows
General anxiety disorders
What is the first criticism of Mowrer’s model?
What is the rebuttal?
Criticism: Why more fears for certain stimuli?
Rebuttal:Evolutionary preparedness/prepared learning - Snakes, spiders, etc.
General anxiety disorders
What is the second criticism of Mowrer’s model?
What is the rebuttal?
Criticism: Why sometimes fear without traumatic experience?
Rebuttal: Vicarious learning, information transfer, inflation
- Learning through someone else’s experience
- Inflation: Of the association via new information