PSY340H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Barbiturate, Prolonged Exposure Therapy, Comorbidity
Document Summary
Anxiety: that unpleasant feeling of fear and apprehension. The tendency to perceive threat in neutral or ambiguous life situations predicts elevated anxiety. Must be chronic, relatively intense, associated with role impairment, cause significant distress. Prevalent among children but can be found in adults. Psychoanalysts see phobias as a symbol of an important unconscious fear. Behaviourists focus on how the fears are acquired. Behavioural theories: avoidance conditioning: reactions are learned avoidance responses; this can be done in two ways. Via classical conditioning- person can learn to fear a neutral stimulus (cs) and pair it with an intrinsically painful or frightening event (ucs) Person can learn to reduce this conditioned fear by escaping for avoiding the cs. The second kind of learning is assumed to be operant conditioning: the response is maintained by its reinforcing consequences of reducing fear. Can also be learned as a result of a bad encounter with that object or situation: modelling.
