PSYCHOLOGY STUDY LINE

Anxiety
Anxiety is a general feeling of apprehension about possible danger, was in Freud’s formulation a sign of an inner battle or conflict between some primitive desire (from the id) and prohibitions against its expression (from the ego and the superego). Sometimes this anxiety seem evident to him in clients who were obviously fearful and nervous. Today DSM has identified such cases within a group of disorders that share obvious symptoms and features of anxiety known as the anxiety disorders.

Panic
Panic is a basic emotion that occurs in many higher animals and humans iyt is usually associated with a distinctive facial expression and involves activation of the fight or flight response of the sympathetic nervous system. This allows us to respond rapidly when faced with a dangerous situation such as being threatened by a predator. In humans who are having a panic attack there is no external threat panic occurs because of some misfiring of this response system.

Phobia
Phobia is a persistent and disproportionate fear of some specific objects or situation that presents little or no actual danger to a person. When a person with a phobia encounters a feared object he or she will often experience the fight or flight response, which prepares a person to escape from the situation. Thus psychologically and behaviorally the phobic response is often identical to that which would in an encounter with an objectively terrifying situation.
In DSM IV there are three main categories of phobias
1) Specific phobia
2) Social phobia
3) Agora phobia.
Specific Phobia (simple phobias) may involve fears of other species or fear of various aspects of the environment (tunnels or bridges).
Social phobias involve fear of social situations in which a person is exposed to the scrutiny of others and is afraid of acting in a humiliating or embracing way. Social phobias may be circumscribed (as in fear of public speaking or generalized (as in fear of any social interaction).
Agora phobia was thought to involve, somewhat paradoxically a fear of both open and enclosed spaces. However it is now understood that agora phobia most often stems from anxiety about having panic attack in situation where escape might prove difficult embracing. The apparent paradox is resolved in this view because escape is difficult from both open and enclosed spaces.
Specific phobias
A person is diagnosed as having specific phobias if he or she shows strong and persistent fear triggered by the presence of or anticipation of an encounter with a specific object or situation. The level of fear must also be excessive or unreasonable relative to the actual danger posed by the object or situation. When individual with specific phobias encounter a phobic stimulus, they almost always show an immediate fear response that often resembles a panic attack except for the existence of a clear external trigger (American Psychiatric Assciation, 1994). The avoidance of the feared situation or the distress experienced in the feared situation must also interfere significantly wirth normal functioning or produce marked distress. In DSM-iv there are now five sub types of phobias listed
1. Animal subtypes_ snakes or spiders
2. Natural environment subtypes_ heights or waters
3. Blood injection- injury subtypes_
4. Situational subtype_ aero plane or elevators
5. Atypical subtype_ choking or vomiting

Some of these specific phobias involve exaggerated fear of things that many of us fear to some extent, such as darkness, fire, disease, spiders and snakes. Others, such as phobias of water or crowds, involve situation that do not elicit fear in most people. Many of us have a at least a few minor irrational fears, but in phobic disorders such fear are intense and often interfere significantly with everyday activities for example- claustrophobic persons may go to great lengths to avoid entering a small room or an elevator even if this means climbing many flights of stairs or tuning down jobs that might require them to take an elevator. This avoidance is a cardinal characteristic of phobias it occurs both because the phobic response itself is so unpleasant and because of phobic person’s irrational appraisal of the likelihood that something terrible will happen.

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