PSYC1002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 27: Attentional Shift, Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder
11 Oct 2018
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Lecture 3: Anxiety and Related Disorders
➢ What is Anxiety?
• Activated in response to perceived threat
• Three interrelated anxiety systems:
o Physical system
▪ Fight/flight response
▪ Mobilises resources to deal with threat
▪ Symptoms: sweating, heart rate, trembling, etc.
▪ Classic symptoms of autonomic arousal
o Cognitive system
▪ Perception of threat
▪ Attentional shift
▪ Hypervigilance – difficulty concentrating on other tasks
o Behavioural system
▪ Escape/avoidance
▪ Freezing
▪ aggression
• The experience of anxiety is the same in normal and abnormal anxiety
➢ Anxiety (Fear, Panic)
• Normal anxiety is necessary for survival
• Eliciting conditions:
o Realistic/objective threat to self
▪ Physical vs. social threat (Lovibond and Rapee, 1955)
o Specific ‘prepared’ stimuli (Seligman, 1971)
▪ Insects, animals, heights, enclosed places, anger
o Novel stimuli
• Threat appraisal → expectancy of harm → automatically elicits anxiety
➢ Threat Appraisal
• Generates expectancy of harm
o Situation: public transport
o Outcome: embarrassment
o Outcome: accident, death
o Outcome: germs, illness
• Product of:
o Perceived probability
o Perceived cost
• Often based on past
o Experience – conditioning, reinforcement
o Observational learning
o instruction
➢ Abnormal Anxiety/Anxiety Disorders
• Not qualitatively different from normal anxiety
o Same physical, cognitive, behavioural aspects
o Occurrence is excessive or inappropriate
▪ Anxiety occurs in absence of objective threat
▪ Anxiety is more intense than objective level of threat
• Characterised by overestimation of threat:
o Probability of negative outcome
