phobias Flashcards
Anxiety vs fear
No activation of the fight or flight response in anxiety
Is anxiety good?
Mild amounts of anxiety can be helpful when experiencing exams or when driving
Adaptive value of anxiety
Can allow us to anticipate upcoming frightening events by mobilising resources
Learned anxiety
Many of our anxiety responses are learned and highly conditionable
Various anxeity disorders
Many individuals with one anxiety disorder can experience another kind of anxiety disorder or depression at a later point in their lives
Classical conditioning of fear or panic to a range of stimuli plays an important role in many disorders
Many common themes in treatments for anxiety disorders
Neuroticism
Proneness or disposition to experience negative mood states
Specific phobia
Present if a person shows strong and persistent fear that is triggered by the presence of a specific object or situation and leads to significant distress or impairment in a person’s ability to function
Blood-injection-injury phobia
Can faint when presented with phobia
Highly heritable
Drop in blood pressure can minimise blood loss
Prevalence of specific phobia
Occurring in about 12 percent of population
More common in women than men
Animal phobias begin in childhood but claustrophobia begins in adulthood
Psychodynamic factors of specific phobias
Defence against anxiety that stems from repressed impulses from the id
Learned behavioural factors of specific phobia
Fear response can be conditioned to previously neutral stimulus when paired with traumatic or painful events
Vicarious conditioning
Watching someone else be fearful of a stimulus can lead us to be fearful of another stimulus
Why doesn’t everyone develop a phobia?
Individual differences in life experiences strongly affect whether conditioned fears or phobias actually develop
Evolutionary preparedness for learning certain fears and phobias
Evolved to be scared of things that can harm us
Guns are more dangerous than water but they weren’t around when we were evolving
Öhman 2009 fear conditioning study
Fear is easily conditioned to fear relevant stimuli like snakes and spiders than fear irrelevant stimuli
Biological causal factors for specific phobia
Individuals with serotonin transporter gene show superior fear conditioning
Treatments for specific phobia
Exposure therapy is most effective treatment
Participant modelling is more effective than doing it alone
More effective to do it in one longer treatment as people only have to go once
Social anxiety disorder
Characterised by fears of one or more specific social situations
Individual afraid of scrutiny and negative evaluation from others
Prevalence of social anxiety disorder
12 percent of population meet diagnostic criteria for social anxiety at some point during their life
One third abuse alcohol to reduce their anxiety in social situations
Only a third recover spontaneously over a 12 year period
Social anxiety as learned behaviour
Social anxiety seems to originate from experiencing or witnessing a perceived social defeat or humiliation
92 percent of people with social anxiety reported history of severe teasing in childhood
Social anxiety in evolutionary context
Evolved as a by product of dominance hierarchies
Humans acquired fears of social stimuli that are based around aggression and dominance
Perceptions of uncontrollability and unpredictability in social anxiety
Being exposed to uncontrollable and unpredictable events like parental divorce can lead to development of social anxiety
Perceptions of uncontrollability can lead to submissive behaviours
Cognitive biases in social anxiety
People with social anxiety may behave poorly and awkwardly which will lead to negative reactions from others in social settings which can create a cycle of social anxiety
Biological causal factors in social anxiety
Behavioural inhibition is most important temperamental variable
If infants are behaviourally inhibited then they will withdraw from social situations, leading to inexperience in social situations and further risk of developing social anxiety
