Abnormal Psychology Chapter 6 Anxiety Let's talk about the characteristics of anxiety. First we'll define anxiety as involving negative feelings and apprehensions about possible feelings. It's a complex blend of unpleasant emotions and thoughts. It's more oriented to the future and much more diffused than fear. Anxiety has cognitive, physical, and emotional aspects.
and behavioral effects. It's good to some degree in the sense that you know there is an evolutionarily adaptive behavior there that you know high alert says you know get out danger and our anxiety can then motivate and stimulate us to you know stay on our toes and be protected but it can also go overboard and be used constantly for things that it shouldn't be. Fear and panic are both active fight or flight responses.
Fear refers to a response to a immediate danger. Too much fear and we have decreased concentration and unpleasant physical symptoms. Panic attack refers to an abrupt intense fear and thus fear response where there is nothing actually to be afraid of.
That's one of the things that makes it a panic attack is that there is no actual imminent danger. So thrills or chills just to throw it back to chapter one bungee jumping roller coaster riders extreme sports individuals, people who love scary movies, parachuting, you know, all that kind of stuff creates a physiological reaction. Very similar, you know, on a cellular scale to a panic attack.
Of course, they're not panic attacks. And it's most likely related to the fact that the sensation being experienced was sought out. And thus there was an expectation there. You know, expectations are a huge thing in governing, you know, how things turn out, especially in our... perceptions.
Nevertheless, they're also frequently described as fear-provoking. You know, this is a big part of those things that are attracting these people's appeal. Individual differences in fear-seeking and fear-avoidance behaviors can illustrate how cognitive and environmental factors can influence the experience of fear to a remarkable degree. Overview of anxiety disorders. So anxiety disorders are unrealistic and irrational fears of disabilitating intensity.
They're pervasive and persistent. The symptoms are very anxious and fear-oriented. There's a lot of excessive avoid and escape responses, negative reinforcement, significant distress, and overall impairment. The current DSM recognizes five anxiety disorders, that being specific phobia. social phobia or social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia with or without panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
The prevalence of anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders are relatively common. The most common group of sufferers are women. Comorbidity, we're looking at very typical with depression.
About 55 to 75% of cases of anxiety also show signs and symptoms for depression. So, So there's a lot of commonalities there. Phobias are the most common of all the anxiety disorders, actually. Some commonalities found across anxiety disorders.
Biological, there is a genetic vulnerability for this. We see in a limbic system that is abnormally sensitive. We see overly engaged primitive instincts reading danger, danger nonstop in the limbic system. And it doesn't tend to shut off or understand that you're doing too much.
from a neurobiological level what we're seeing is neurotransmitters lower levels of GABA certain levels of norepinephrine and serotonin are key it could be you know hormonal or from medication as well that the neurotransmitter change happens psychological learned behaviors for example you know prepared learning evolutionary psychology you know the what we know, we hand down. The video online where you put the cucumber next to the cat and the cat jumps, the idea there is there's an evolutionarily adaptive idea there, most likely. they're reacting thinking it's a snake, right? Preparedness, think snakes, spiders, waterers.
Once your dog doesn't want to get in the bath, but nothing's going to hurt them, right? And they might even like it at the end. Classical and operant conditioning, coming to know through association, either being told or reinforced and punished. Overprotective or overintrusive, socially isolating parents tend to raise children that have a lot of issues with anxiety.
They have a lot of early expectations with, um, early experiences, I'm sorry, with unpredictable or fearful situations such as the the little Albert example. Social learning and vicarious learning. So this is coming to know things through others, through modeling, through being told, through seeing.
Cognitive, locus of control. People with perceptions of, or people with... with perceptions of lack of control over their environment and their emotions are far more vulnerable for anxiety. We see worry, they expect danger or threat, they tend to be hypervigilant, catastrophizing situations, they interpret physical sensations as dangerous, interpret cues in the environment as threatening even though they're not.
So a person with an internal locus of control believes he or she can influence events and their outcomes. As for someone with an external... An external locus of control blames those outside forces for everything.
So, you know, everything's happening to me. You know, this is my luck. This would totally, you know, be my thing. I'll never get ahead as opposed to an internal locus of control. All right, well, this sucks, but this is only a temporary situation.
I have the knowledge. and ability in me to overcome this or pivot or do something else. Social, stressful life events, social peer pressure, environmental cues, such as being in a city versus a rural environment. You know, I get anxiety when I go to big cities.
I know some people get far more. Culture shock, just going from one situation to another situation is significantly different. Director vicarious exposure to traumatic experiences. Repeated unpredictable events, especially early ones. Being teased or bullied a lot of times can result in social phobia.
Current beliefs, superstitions, and expectations. These are all top-down processing characteristics. Remember top-down processing characteristics.
processes when we have our perception of an environment or situation or occurrence is heavily dictated by our experience and expectations as opposed to just going in and having a completely new experience. Cultural expectations for fear and panic. We've talked about in other chapters things that occur in other modalities or other nationalities that don't occur here. Yoruba culture in Nigeria indicates three clusters.
of symptoms, worry, dreams, and bodily complaints. So some anxiety is showing up in this individual's dreams. The worry makes sense. And the body complaints. The culturally related syndrome in China called Koro.
Koro is a cultural-specific syndrome. It's a delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that one's genitalia are retracting up inside them and will eventually disappear, despite the lack of any true long-standing changes to the genitals including measurements that are taken consistently. Caribbean cultures and the attack of the nerves.
So something that happens somewhere else similar to what we have but not the same thing. You know in the Caribbean although it's used in common cultural form to refer to a specific pattern of symptoms rather than being a general term for feeling nervous. So the idea is they have a whole lot less general anxiety or social anxiety and they have more of these attack of the nerves.
Reported aspects of this syndrome include uncontrollable screaming or shouting, crying, trembling, sensations of the heart rising in the chest and the head, disassociative experiences, and verbal or physical aggression. The reaction is usually associated with a stressful event, specifically related to the family, although it does not have to be from all occurrences. So despite comparisons to a panic attack, however, when we chop up what we have here with the DSM-5, investigators are saying that this is completely different than a panic attack. Oh, anxiety symptoms unique to Japanese cultural patterns, fear of blushing, fear of making eye contact specifically on public transport, fear of farting in public or emitting any kind of offensive odor.
Integrated model. This theory states that there are more types of vulnerabilities. I'm sorry, this theory states the more types of vulnerabilities you have, so the greater diathesis you have, the more likely it is that you're going to develop an anxiety disorder.
And once the signs and symptoms of an anxiety disorder start, they tend to feed on your existing feelings and start to just snowball and create a bigger situation. Commonalities across effective treatments. Graduated control exposure therapy with systematic desensitization is the single most effective treatment for anxiety disorders. So graduated controlled exposure therapy is when we are theoretically just...
Little bit by little bit, exposing you to the things that make you anxious or make you fearful. Little bit by little bit. And when we pair this with systematic desensitization, what we're doing is we're actually creating a situation where you are relaxed and then I introduce the thing that you're fearful of, right?
I'll wait until you're relaxed. It could be something as, this is an extreme example, but if someone was getting, if someone was afraid of spiders and they were getting a massage, and so while being massaged, they were... instructed to think about spiders or look at pictures of spiders, perhaps noticing a spider on the desk or something to that effect.
Modeling, role modeling, and rehearsal, especially with social phobia, are incredibly effective treatments. And cognitive restructuring. This is a psychotherapeutic process of learning to identify and dispute your irrational and maladaptive thoughts. known as cognitive distortion. So when you start to have that negative self-talk loop where you start to loop out of control and say that everything sucks and you're a sucky, terrible person, you stop it.
Why, am I? No, exactly. You can do things like all or nothing thinking, which is splitting.
magical thinking, overgeneralization, magnification, and emotional reasoning all can be re-evaluated in this model and changed drastically. Cognitive restructuring employs many strategies, such as Socratic questioning. You're really trying to find the answer going down that path. My life is terrible.
Is your life terrible? Everything is terrible. Is every single thing terrible? Thought recording, guided imagery.
It's used in many types of... therapies including cognitive behavioral therapy cbt and rational emotive therapy ret there are virtual virtual reality treatments which are especially effective in treating phobias such as heights and things like that because we can put someone in that situation without putting putting them in any danger relaxation and breathing techniques help i've included the link there for a progressive muscle relaxation meditation i recommend that you find yourself a nice dark room post up and Listen to this on your phone. Psychotropic medications such as benzodiazepines and antidepressants, MAOI inhibitors, SSRIs such as Xanax or Klonopin.
We'll talk about all these things in greater depth. So I'm going to cut this video for now and then I'll come back and we'll talk about types of.