Fear
The CNS's physiological and emotional response to a serious threat to one's well-being.
Anxiety
The CNS's physiological and emotional response to a vague sense of threat or danger.
Anxiety Disorder
Diagnosed in a person who sufferers such disabling fear and anxiety that they cannot lead normal lives.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
A disorder marked by persistent and excessive feelings of anxiety and worry about numerous events and activities, a problem sometimes described as free-floating anxiety.
Sociocultural Theorists
Believe that generalized anxiety disorder is most likely to develop in people who are faced with societal conditions that are truly dangerous.
Poverty
One of the most powerful forms of societal stress.
Sigmund Freud
Believed that all children experience some degree of anxiety as part of growing up, and all use ego defense mechanisms to help control such anxiety. When children experience particularly high levels of anxiety, or their defense mechanisms are inadequate,
Realistic Anxiety
According to Freud, anxiety experienced by children when they face actual danger.
Moral Anxiety
According to Freud, anxiety experienced by children when they are punished or threatened for expressing their id impulses.
Neurotic Anxiety
According to Freud, anxiety experienced by children when they are repeatedly prevented, by parents or other circumstances, from expressing their id impulses.
Today's Psychodynamic Theorists
Believe that generalized anxiety disorder can be traced to inadequacies in the early relationships between children and their parents.
Freudian Psychodynamic Therapists
Use free association and their interpretations of transference, resistance, and dreams to help clients with generalized anxiety disorder become less afraid of their id impulses and more successful in controlling them.
Object Relations Therapists
Use free association and their interpretations of transference, resistance, and dreams to help anxious patients identify and settle the childhood relationship problems that continue to produce anxiety in adulthood.
Short-Term Psychodynamic Therapy
Psychodynamic therapy which has in some cases significantly reduced the levels of anxiety, worry, and social difficulty of patients with generalized anxiety disorder.
Humanistic Theorists
Propose that generalized anxiety disorder arises when people stop looking at themslves honestly and acceptingly.
Conditions of Worth
According to Carl Rodgers, what is developed by children who fail to receive unconditional positive regard, marked by being overly critical of oneself and having harsh self-standards.
Client-Centered Therapy
The humanistic therapy developed by Carl Rodgers in which clinicians try to help clients by being accepting, empathizing accurately, and conveying genuineness.
Cognitive Theorists
Believed that generalized anxiety disorder is primarily caused by maladaptive assumptions.
Basic Irrational Assumptions
The inaccurate and inappropriate beliefs held by people with various psychological problems (generalized anxiety disorder), according to Albert Ellis.
Metacognitive Theory
A new wave cognitve theory, developed by Adrian Wells, that suggests that people with generalized anxiety disorder implicitly hold both positive and negative beliefs about worrying. The negative beliefs, however, are the ones that open the door to this di
Metaworry
Worry about the fact that one always seems to be worrying.
Intolerance of Uncertainty Theory
A new wave cognitve explanation for generalized anxiety disorder that suggests that certain individuals believe that any possibility of a negative event occurring, no matter how slim, means that the event is likely to occur.
Avoidance Theory
A new wave cognitve explanation, developed by Thomas Borkovec, that suggests that people with generalized anxiety disorder have greater bodily arousal than others and that worrying actually serves to reduce this arousal, perhaps by distracting people from
Rational-Emotive Therapy
A cognitive therapy developled by Albert Ellis that helps clients identify and change the irrational assumptions and thinking that help cause their psych disorder (generalized anxiety disorder).
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
A cognitive therapy developed by Steven Hayes that helps clients become aware of their streams of thoughts, including their worries, as they are occuring and to accept such thinking as mere events of the mind.
Family Pedigree Study
A research design in which investigators determine how many and which relatives of a person with a disorder have the same disorder.
Benzodiazepines
The most common group of antianxiety drugs, which includes Valium and Xanax.
GABA
The neurotransmitter whose low activity has been linked to generalized anxiety disorder.
Sedative-Hypnotic Drugs
Drugs that calm people at lower doses and help them to fall asleep at higher doses.
Relaxation Training
A biological treatment procedure that teaches clients to relax at will so they can calm themselves in stressful situations.
Biofeedback
A biological treatment technique in which a client is given info about physiological reactions as they occur and learns to control the reactions voluntarily.
Electromyograph (EMG)
A device that provides feedback on the amount of muscular tension in the body.
Phobia
A persistent and unreasonable fear of a particular object, activity, or situation.
Specific Phobia
A severe and persistent fear of a specific object or situation (other than agoraphobia and social phobia).
Social Phobia
A severe and persistent fear of social or performance situations in which embarrassment may occur; may be narrow or broad.
Agoraphobia
An anxiety disorder in which a person is afraid of being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing) or help unavailable if panic-like symptoms were to occur.
Taijn Kyofusho
A culture-bound disorder particularly popular in Asian countries that is traditionally defined as a pervasive fear of making people feel uncomfortable.
Classical Conditiong
A process of learning in which 2 events that repeatedly occur close together in time become tied together in a person's mind and so produce the same response; behaviorists propose it as a common way of acquiring phobias.
Modeling
A process of learning in which a person observers and then imitates others; behaviorists propose it as a common way of acquiring phobias.
Stimulus Generalization
A phenomenon in which responses to one stimulus are also produced by similar stimuli (behavioral).
Preparedness
A predisposition to develop certain fears.
Galvanic Skin Responses (GSR)
Skin reactions; can be used as a measure of fear in experiments.
Exposure Treatments
Behavioral treatments in which persons are exposed to the objects or situations they dread.
Systematic Desensitization
A behavioral treatment that uses relaxation training and a fear hierarchy to help clients with phobias react calmly to the objects or situations they dread.
Fear Hierarchy
A list of objects or situations that frighten a person, starting with those that are slightly feared and ending with those that are feared greatly.
In Vivo Desensitization
Systematic desensitization that involves an actual confrontation with dreaded objects or situations.
Covert Desensitization
Systematic desensitization that involves an imagined confrontation with dreaded objects or situations.
Flooding
A treatment for phobias in which clients are exposed repeatedly and intensively to a feared object and made to see that it is actually harmless.
Modeling (Vicarious Conditioning)
A treatment for phobias in which the therapist is the one who confronts the feared object or situation while the fearful person observes.
Participant Modeling
A treatment for phobias in which the therapist is the one who confronts the feared object or situation and the client is encouraged to join in with the therapist.
Virtual Reality
3D computer graphics that stimulate real-world objects and situations and that can be a useful exposure tool in the treatment of phobias.
2 Distinct Features of Social Phobias
1. Sufferers may have overwhelming social fears.
2. Sufferers may lack skill at starting conversations, communicating their needs, or meeting the needs of others.
Ways of Reducing Social Fears
1. Antidepressant drugs.
2. Exposure therapy.
3. Cognitive therapies, often in combination with behavioral ones, such as rational-emotive therapy.
Social Skills Training
A therapy approach that helps people learn or improve social skills and assertiveness through role playing and rehearsing of desirable behaviors while therapists give frank feedback and reinforce clients for effective behavior.
Panic Attacks
Periodic, short bouts of panic that occur suddenly, reach apeak within minutes, and gradually pass.
Symptoms of Panic
1. Heart palpatations
2. Tingling hands and feet
3. Shortness of breath
4. Faintness
5. Dizziness
6. Feeling of unreality
Panic Disorder
An anxiety disorder marked by recurrent and unpredictable panic attacks.
Norepinephrine
A neurotransmitter whose abnormal activity is linked to panic disorder and depression.
Locus Ceruleus
A small area of the brain that seems to be active in the regulation of emotions. Many of its neurons use neuropinephrine and increased activity of norepinephrine at this area has been linked to panic reactions.
Amygdala
A small almond-shaped structure in the brain that processes emotional information and is stimulated when a person confronts a frightening object or situation, setting into motion an "alarm-and-escape" response.
Cognitive Theorists
Believe full panic reactions are experienced only by people who further misinterpret that physiological events that are occurring with their bodies.
Biological Challenge Test
A procedure used to produce panic in participants or clients by having them exercise vigorously or perform some other potentially panic-inducing task in the presence of a researcher or therapist.
Anxiety Sensitivity
A tendency to focus on one's bodily sensations, assess them illogically, and interpret them as harmful.
Interoceptive Exposure
A biological challenge procedure that is applied in cognitive therapy.
Obsession
A persistent thought, idea, impulse, or image that is experienced repeatedly, feels intrusive, and causes anxiety; often takes the form of a wish, impulse, image, idea, or doubt.
Compulsion
A repetitive and rigid behavior or mental act that a person feels driven to perform in order to prevent or reduce anxiety.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
A disorder in which a person has recurrent and unwanted thoughts, a need to perform repetitive and rigid actions, or both.
Psychodynamic Theorists
Believe that OCD occurs when the battle between anxiety-provoking id impulses (obsessive thoughts) and anxiety-reducing defense mechanisms (counterthoughts or compulsive actions) is not buried in the unconscious but is played out in dramatic thoughts and
Undoing
An ego defense mechanism that is common in OCD whereby a person unconsciously cancels out an unacceptable desire or act by performing another act.
Isolation
An ego defense mechanism that is common in OCD in which people unconsciously isolate and disown undesirable and unwanted thoughts, experiencing them as foreign intrusions.
Reaction Formation
An ego defense mechanism that is common in OCD whereby a person suppresses an unacceptable desire by taking on a lifestyle that expresses the opposite desire.
Anal Stage
According to Freud, a develpmental stage during which some children experience intense rage and shame as a result of negative toilet-training experiences which can lead to OCD.
Exposure and Response (Ritual) Prevention
A behavioral treatment, first developed by V. Meyer, used for OCD that exposes the client to anxiety-arousing thoughts or situations and then prevents the client from performing his or her compulsive act.
Self-Help
Procedures that behavioral therapists assign as homework for clients in exposure and response prevention.
Neutralizing
A person's attempt to eliminate unwanted thoughts by thinking or behaving in ways that put matters right internally, making up for the unacceptable thoughts (cognitive).
Cognitive Therapists
Believe that OCD sufferers blame themselves for repetitive, unwanted, and intrusive thoughts rather than dismissing or ignoring them and expect that somehow terrible things will happen.
Habituation Training
A cognitive, therapeutic technique in which a therapist tries to call forth a client's obsessive thoughts again and again, with the expectation that the thoughts will eventually lose their power to frighten and thus to cause anxiety.
Cognitive-Behavioral Treatments for OCD
Treatments that teach clients to view their obsesive thoughts as inaccurate occurancences rather than as valid and dangerous cognitions for which they are responsible and upon which they must act.
Serotonin
A neurotransmitter whose abnormal activity is linked to depression, OCD, and eating disorders, along with glutamate, GABA, and dopamine in OCD.
Neuromodulator
A neurotransmitter that helps modify or regulate the effect of other neurotransmitters.
Orbitofrontal Cortex
A region of the brain in which impulses involving excretion, sexuality, violence, and other primitive activities normally arise.
Caudate Nuclei
Structures in the brain, within the region known as the basal ganglia, that help convert sensory informaiton into thoughts and actions.
Stress Management Program
An approach to treating generalized and other anxiety disorders that teaches clients techniques for reducing and controlling stress.