PSYCH101 Chapter Notes -Somatic Symptom Disorder, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Psychological Repression

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Richard Ennis

Document Summary

Anxiety is both a feeling and a cognition, a doubt-laden appraisal of one"s safety or social skill. Freud proposed that anxiety can develop because of the childhood memory that was repressed and is submerged mental energy that is developed as anxiety. Today"s psychologist have turned to two perspectives learning and biological. The learning perspective fear conditioning : when bad events happen uncontrollably and unpredictably, the anxiety develops. Through conditioning, the short list of naturally painful and frightening events can multiply into a long list of human fears. Two specific learning processes can contribute to such anxiety. Firstly, stimulus generalization occurs for example, when you were beaten by a dog, later you are scared of all dogs. The other one is reinforcement, that when you have phobia on something, you release your anxiety by avoiding that, but your phobia gets deeper as you avoid that thing.