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Different aspects of Anxiety
• Phenomenological– Affective: dread, tension, worry– Cognitive: expectations of an
inability to cope, impaired cognitive ability
• Behavioural – Impaired motor functioning and
avoidance
• Physiological– increased blood pressure, heart
rate, breathing; disruptions in GI functioning and dizziness
Types of Anxiety Disorders
• Panic Disorder
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• Phobias
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Panic Disorder
• Panic Attack
• Cued (situationally bound) v.s. Uncued (unexpected) panic attacks
• Panic Disorder
Panic Disorder: Agoraphobia
• Fear of being in a situation where having a panic attack would be dangerous or where escape would be impossible
Phobias
• Phobias involve– intense, persistent fear of
something that poses no real threat
– avoidance of the feared object/situation
Specific Phobia– fear of circumscribed objects or
situations
Phobias
• Algophobia -pain
• Astraphobia -thunderstorms
• Pathophobia -disease
• Monophobia -being alone
• Mysophobia -contamination
• Nyctophobia -darkness
• Ochlophobia -crowds
Phobias: Social Phobia
• Fear of social embarrassment or humiliation– public speaking– eating in public– using public bathrooms
• Impact on self confidence and restricts social activity
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
• Intense fear and helplessness in response to events involving actual or threatened death or serious injury.
• Acute Stress Disorder– symptoms last for 2 days - 4
weeks
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder– symptoms last at least 1 month
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
• Obsession– unwanted thought or image that
keeps intruding into awareness
• Compulsion– an action that a person feels
compelled to repeat again and again despite a lack of desire to do so
The Psychodynamic Approach to Anxiety
• Anxiety is a signal that the ego is having a hard time mediating between reality, id and superego.
• Different anxiety disorders are the result of different defense mechanisms used to cope.
The Psychodynamic Approach to Anxiety: Attachment Theories
• Bowlby– disturbances in parent-child bond
leads to “anxious attachment” and a vulnerability to anxiety disorders later in life
The Behavioural Approach to Anxiety
• Mowrer (1948) Avoidance learning– 1) classical (respondent)
conditioning– 2) negative reinforcement
The Biological Approach to Anxiety
• Genetic Component– family and twin studies suggest a
genetic component in most anxiety disorders
– panic disorder shows the strongest genetic component and generalized anxiety disorder the least
The Biological Approach to Anxiety
• “Suffocation false alarm hypothesis” of panic disorder
• serotonin and basal ganglia abnormalities in OCD
• hormonal theory of PTSD
• State-dependent learning
The Cognitive Approach to Anxiety
• Individuals misperceive and misinterpret internal and external stimuli
Cognitive Appraisal
• Stimulus--->Appraisal---> Response– evaluation of stimulus based on
memories, beliefs, and expectations
Information Processing
• Schema– how we understand the
information we take in from the environment
• Selective Attention– what information we take in
Cognitive Approach to Panic Disorder
• Catastrophic interpretations of bodily sensations
• Feeling of control
• Some Problems:– panic attacks during sleep– why do catastrophic
interpretations develop
• Several cognitive models of anxiety suggest that attentional biases to threat cues cause and maintain anxiety disorders.
• Empirical findings:– Lavy and van den Hout (1993),
individuals with spider phobia show an attentional bias to spiders
– Ehlers and Breuer (1995), individuals with panic disorder show an attentional bias towards unpleasant body cues
Pair of Pictures: 500ms
Fixation Cross: 1000ms
F / E judgement
Temporal sequence of events for each trial
+
E
Probe Display:until response
Participants
• Two kinds of participants (high and low social anxiety)
• Participants were university students selected for high and low social anxiety (FNE, also measured trait anxiety)
Experimental Conditions
• Two kinds of experimental conditions (threat and no threat)
• Threat: Half of the participants were told the experiment was an assessment of social skills and public speaking ability.
Picture Displays
• Three kinds of picture displays (positive, negative and neutral face, each paired with a household object)
Experimental Design
• Two kinds of participants (high and low social anxiety)
• Two kinds of experimental conditions (threat and no threat)
• Three kinds of faces (negative, neutral and positive) each displayed with a household object (clocks, chairs etc.)
Bias Score
Bias Score =
RT to identify probe when the face and probe are in opposite positions
RT to identify probe when the face and probe are in the same position
-
Pair of Pictures: 500ms
Fixation Cross: 1000ms
F / E judgement
Temporal sequence of events for each trial
+
E
Probe Display:until response
Results
• In the social threat condition, the high socially anxious participants avoided negative and positive faces,
• whereas the low socially anxious participants showed no bias.
Discussion of Results
• Lavy and van den Hout (1993) found that spider phobics show an attentional bias towards pictures of spiders.– Why are spider phobics and social
phobics different?
Discussion of Results
• How might this attentional bias (to avoid emotionally expressive faces) contribute to the maintenance of social phobia?