Anxiety and fear-related disorders

• Anxiety disorders are characterized by frequent and persistent worry
• Anxiety disorders involve perceiving threats that are disproportionate or non-existent
• Panic attack


  • Hyperventilation
  • Heart palpitations
  • Vomiting
  • Chills or hot flashes
  • Sweating
  • Trembling
  • Numbness or tingling
  • Dizziness
  • Fear of dying or losing control
  • Shortness of breath
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

  Anxious response to many different stimuli
• Phobias


  Anxious responses to specific stimuli
• The DSM categorizes different types of anxiety disorders
• Fear


  Emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat
• Anxiety


  Anticipation of future threat
• Agoraphobia


  An anxiety disorder where people feel fearful and want to avoid situations where they might feel panic, trapped or helpless
• Situations that can trigger agoraphobia

  • Standing in line
  • Being in a crowd
  • Being in an open space
  • Using public transport
  • Being outside the home by oneself
• Agoraphobia can severely impact a person's social life if they avoid going out
• Hemophobia or blood phobia


  The irrational fear of blood
• Hemophobia can extend to fear of injections, needles or invasive medical procedures
• When people with hemophobia see blood or related things, their heart rate increases but their blood pressure drops, resulting in fainting
• Koumpounophobia

  The fear of buttons
• Blood Injury Phobia Inventory (BIPI)


  A self-report scale that measures hemophobia by testing cognitive, physiological and behavioral reactions to blood and injection situations
• Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7 (GAD-7)


  A screening test that measures the severity of generalized anxiety disorder symptoms
• The GAD-7 is not a diagnostic test, it is just a tool to measure anxiety levels and determine if a referral to a psychiatrist is needed
• Psychometric properties refer to the study of measuring human characteristics, including validity and reliability
• Self-report scales have benefits like allowing privacy but also potential issues like bias and inaccuracy in quantifying complex experiences
• There can be cultural biases in how phobias and anxiety are perceived and measured across different cultures
• People tend to compare North American or Western cultural values versus Southeast Asian or Asian cultural values - individualistic cultures versus collectivistic cultures
• Westerners are usually perceived as being more extroverted, sociable, and willing to mix around with strangers more easily compared to Asians
• In Asia, people don't usually socialize with strangers as much as Westerners
• Westerners may perceive Asians who stay at home a lot as having agoraphobia, but this is just a difference in cultural norms
• Scales and measures of psychological constructs are often created in Western countries and may not fully capture Asian cultural perspectives
• Behavioral explanation of phobias

  Classical conditioning - pairing a neutral stimulus (e.g. a white rat) with an unconditioned stimulus that elicits a fear response (e.g. a loud noise), resulting in the neutral stimulus becoming a conditioned stimulus that elicits the fear response
• The Little Albert experiment demonstrated classical conditioning of a fear response in a baby
• Unconditioned stimulus (UCS)


  Stimulus that naturally elicits a response (e.g. loud noise)
• Unconditioned response (UCR)


  Natural response to the unconditioned stimulus (e.g. crying)
• Neutral stimulus (NS)


  Stimulus that does not naturally elicit a response (e.g. white rat)
• Conditioned stimulus (CS)


  Neutral stimulus that has become associated with the unconditioned stimulus and now elicits the conditioned response (e.g. white rat)
• Conditioned response (CR)

  Learned response to the conditioned stimulus (e.g. crying)
• The Little Albert experiment was considered unethical as the researchers did not attempt to remove the conditioned fear response
• Phobias can also develop through observational learning, where a person learns to fear something by observing others' fearful reactions
• Psychoanalytic explanation of phobias

  Freud's theory that phobias are a manifestation of internal conflicts between the id, ego, and superego
• Id

  Represents basic, primal desires and impulses
• Ego


  Balances the id's desires with the superego's moral standards
• Superego

  Represents the moral compass, determining right from wrong
• Oedipus complex


  Freudian theory that boys have unconscious sexual desires towards their mothers and see their fathers as rivals