Outline clinical characteristics of phobia (8) Rosenhan and Seligman said that ‘A phobia is a persistent fear reaction that is strongly out of proportion to the reality of the danger’. Is an extreme, irrational fear of an object or situation, e.g. arachnophobia (fear of spiders). The sufferer is well aware of how irrational, excessive and unreasonable their phobia is, but this awareness does not help them. When a person with a phobia encounters the stimulus which causes their fear they experience extreme anxiety and will show avoidance behaviour.
Specific phobias: excessive, unrealistic fear of a specific object or situation. Sufferers of this avoid the object or situation or have intense distress while encountering it. xxix. Social phobia/social anxiety disorder: severe, persistent, and irrational fear of negative evaluation by others. xxx.
Once he or she stops thinking about going to this place entirely, he or she will then start to feel better and the anxiety will disappear. This is an example of how classical conditioning and avoidance of these feared objects will make the phobia worse. There may be many different causes when it comes to phobias such as a childhood trauma or genetics, but classical conditioning plays an important role in either reinforcing or causing these simple phobias, sometimes both. Through this conditioning, people have repeatedly associated the fear with terrible anxiety, strengthening the fear. This can interfere with your everyday life, because a person will go to great extents and avoid numerous situations that may have snakes to do with it, such as an aquarium, or where ever snakes may be.
This type of stress releases chemicals such as cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine that will escalate our motivation, and strengthen the body. In contrast the bad stress referred as distress is when we feel threaten either physically or emotionally. For the student’s brain this can be not being able to find the solution to the problem, not having enough resources to solve the problem or having prolonged stress over experiencing repeated situations. When the brain is in distress it loses its ability to process things correctly because it poses a physical or emotional danger themselves. The area of the brain most affected by high stress is the hippocampus, which is very sensitive to cortisol.
Personality Disorder - People with personality disorders have extreme and inflexible personality traits that are distressing to the person and/or cause problems in work, school or social relationships. In addition, the person’s pattern’s of thinking and behaviour significantly differ from the expectations of society and are so rigid that they interfere with the person’s normal functioning. Examples include antisocial personality disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorder and paranoid personality disorder. Anxiety Disorders - People with anxiety disorders respond to certain objects or situations with fear and dread, as well as physical signs of anxiety or nervousness, such as rapid heartbeat and sweating. An anxiety disorder is diagnosed if the persons response is not appropriate for the situation, if the person cannot control the response, or if the anxiety interferes with their normal functioning.
People with antisocial disorder will act instead of feel; they find it difficult to talk about their personal emotional experiences. The feelings of helpless and a scared victim during childhood stage makes them want to scare and victimize others when they grow up (Hansel & Damour, 2008). Furthermore, the psychodynamic aspect also delves into analyzing early childhood attachments of individuals with antisocial personality disorder. Gabbard (2000) stated that “normal parent-child attachment paves the way for the internalization of a morally guiding superego and the ability to empathize with others. People with antisocial personality disorder show abnormal superego functioning and a lack of empathic ability to imagine how others feel, presumably due to disrupted parent-child relationships” (Hansel & Damour, 2008, p.
Borderline Personality Disorder Kerry Jefferson PSY 303 George Bell IV, M.A. Mar 10, 2013 Borderline Personality Disorder Borderline personality disorder (BPD) affects individual’s emotion state. They have irrational mood swings. But one of the things that affect them is the fear of abandonment. When something like this happens to them it affects others around them, because they fill like they have to constantly walking on eggshells.
Generally dogs in response to a bowl of food salivated however they wanted to see if they could pair this with a bell ringing. So every time they dogs received their food the bell rang and in the end when the bell rang the dogs salivated because they already associated the bell ring with their food. Operant conditioning however is the course of altering behaviour by receiving rewards and punishments. In this experiment they made a cat learn that every time it gets out of the box that it was placed in got a reward. This means it learnt doing the same escape routine because it knew the consequences were rewarding.
‘Outline and evaluate classification and diagnosis of OCD’ 24 marks OCD is an anxiety disorder characterized by obsessions that lead to compulsions. Obsessions manifest themselves as repetitive, recurring and unwanted thoughts, which cause anxiety and are a product of the individual’s own mind. One example may be the constant thought that something negative will happen to you. This obsession will then lead to a compulsion, which the patient believes will prevent these unwanted thoughts coming to life. For example, the idea that by keeping everything abnormally clean and organised the thought that something negative will happen to you will be prevented.
Anxiety is called an internalizing disorder because it involves the child’s thoughts and emotional states. It can result in a negative perception of life, causing distress and inability to live normally. Causes of childhood anxiety A genetic or environmental contribution cannot be ruled out because the incidence of childhood