Phobias Flashcards
What are phobias?
A type of anxiety disorder with the primary symptoms being extreme anxiety and the desire to avoid the feared object or situation. E.g arachnophobia affects a persons everyday life.
What are the two behavioural characteristics of phobias?
Panic: typical response in phobias where the person shows a range of behaviours e.g crying, screaming, or running away, or in some cases, freeze.
Avoidance: Person goes out of their way to avoid being near the thing bringing fear.
What are the three emotional characteristics of Phobias?
Anxiety- an unpleasant high state of emotional arousal, inability to relax and difficulty to experience positive emotion.
Fear- not same as anxiety, unpleasant and immediate emotion caused by threat/danger, pain/harm
Embarrassment- self conscious emotion, phobics are embarrassed about the way they’re behaving as they realise their response is out of proportional to the threat
Define behavioural, cognitive, and emotional
Behavioural, what the patient does
Cognitive, what the patient thinks
Emotional, what the patient feels.
What are the two cognitive characteristics with phobias?
Problems with attention- hyper-orienting + hyper-vigilance
Irrational beliefs- holding a belief that isn’t true or something that is an exaggeration e.g a spider may harm you if its on the other side of the room.
Define hypervigilance
The person is constantly on the lookout for the cause of their phobia
Define hyper-orienting
Their attention system is captured and drawn to the stimulus straight away and is hard to redirect this.
