Unit XII Module 66: Anxiety disorders, Obsessive-compulsive Disorder, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for 4 weeks or more after a traumatic experience.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions).
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
An anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.
Phobia
An anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.
Panic disorder
An anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations. Often followed by worry over a possible next attack.
Classical and operant conditioning: 1.Stimulus generalization occurs. Ex: fearing all dogs after being attached by an aggressive dog 2. Reinforcement. Avoiding or escaping a stressful situation reduces anxiety, which reinforces the phobic behavior. Observational learning: Monkeys in the wild fear snakes, monkeys reared in a lab do not. The lab monkeys learned to fear snakes after being with the wild monkeys. Cognition: How we interpret a creaky sound in our house contributes to our anxiety.
Explain how we learn fear from the learning perspective.
Agoraphobia
Fear of avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide open places, where one has felt loss of control and panic.
Natural selection: phobias about potential threats lead to avoidance, which may have helped our descendants to survive. Genes: identical twins may develop similar phobias.
Give an example of how anxiety disorder might have been passed down from our biological ancestors.
Social Anxiety disorder (social phobia)
Intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such.
Post traumatic growth
Positive psychological changes as a result of struggling with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises.
Anxiety disorders
Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety.
Actions.
The key difference between obsessions and compulsions is that compulsions involve repetitive
1. Serotonin 2. Glutamate
What 2 neurotransmitters might be involved in Anxiety?
What defines and explains PTSD is less the event itself than the severity and persistence of the trauma memory (Rubin et al., 2008). The greater one's emotional distress during a trauma, the higher the risk for post traumatic symptoms (Ozer et al., 2003).
What determines whether a person suffers PTSD after a traumatic event?
Free-floating is a term by Sigmund Freud to say that a person may not be able to identify, and therefore deal with or avoid, the cause of the anxiety.
What does it mean that the anxiety of GAD is free-floating?
"Shellshock" and "battle fatigue"
What were the old names for PTSD?
They cross the line when they persistently interfere with everyday living and cause distress.
When does OCD cross the line between normal and disorder?
