Anxiety Disorders

The central nervous system's physiological and emotional response to a serious threat to one's well-being.

The CNS's physiological and emotional response to a vague sense of threat or danger.

A disorder marked by persistent and excessive feelings of anxiety and worry about numerous events and activities.

A cognitive therapy developed by Albert Ellis that helps clients identify and change the irrational assumptions and thinking that help cause their psychological disorder.

A research design in which investigators determine how many and which relatives of a person with a disorder have the same disorder.

The most common goup of antianxiety drugs, which includes Valium and Xanax.

The neurotransmitter gammaaminobutyric acid, whose low activity has been linked to generalized anxiety disorder.

Drugs that calm people at lower doses and help them to fall asleep at higher doses.

A treatment procedure that teaches clients to relax at will so they can calm themselves in stressful situations.

A treatment technique in which a client is given information about physiological reactions as they occur and learns to control the reactions voluntarily.

A device that provides feedback about the level of muscular tension in the body.

A persistent and unreasonable fear of a particular object, activity, or situation.

A severe and persistent fear of a specific object or situation (other than agoraphobia and social phobia).

A severe and persistent fear of social or performance sitautions in which embarrassment may occur.

A process of learning in which two events that repeatedly occur close together in time become tied together in a person's mind and so produce the same response.

A process of learning in which a person observes and then imitates others. Also, a therapy approach based on the same principle.

A phenomenon in which responses to one stimulus are also produced by similar stimuli.

A predisposition to develop certain fears.

Behavioral treatments in which persons are exposed to the objects or situations they dread.

A behavioral treatment that uses relaxation training and a fear hierarchy to help clients with phobias react calmly to the objects or situations they dread.

A list of objects or situations that frighten a person, starting with those that are slightly feared and ending with those that are feared greatly.

A treatment for phobias in which clients are exposed repeatedly and intensively to a feared object and made to see that it is actually harmless.

A therapy approach that helps people learn or improve social skills and assertiveness through role playing and rehearsing of desirable behaviors.

Periodic, short bouts of panic that occur suddenly, reach a peak within minutes, and gradually pass.

An anxiety disorder marked by recurrent and unpredictable panic attacks.

An anxiety disorder in whcih a person is afraid to be in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing) or help unavailable if panic-like symptoms were to occur.

A neurotransmitter whose abnormal activity is linked to panic disorder and depression.

A small area of the brain that seems to be active in the regulation of emotions. Many of its neurons use norepinephrine.

A small, almond-shaped structure in the brain that processes emotional information.

A procedure used to produce panic in participants or clients by having them exercise vigorously or perform some other potentially panic-inducing task in the presence of a researcher or therapist.

A tendency to focus on one's bodily sensations, assess them illogically, and interpet them as harmful.

A persistent thought, idea, impulse, or image that is experienced repeatedly, feels intrusive, and causes anxiety.

A repetitive and rigid behavior or mental act that a person feels driven to perform in order to prevent or reduce anxiety.

A disorder in which a person has recurrent and unwanted thoughts, a need to perform reptitive and rigid actions, or both.

An ego defense mechanism in which people unconsciously isolate and disown undesirable and unwanted thoughts, experiencing them as forein intrusions.

An ego defense mechanism whereby a person unconsciously cancels out an unacceptable desire or act by performing another act.

An ego defense mechanism whereby a person suppresses an unacceptable desire by taking on a lifestyle that expresses the opposite desire.

A behavioral treatment for OCD that exposes a client to a anxiety-arousing thoughts or situations and then prevents the client from performing his or her compulsive acts.

A person's attempt to eliminate unwanted thoughts by thinking or behaving in ways that put matters right internally, making up for the unacceptable thoughts.

A therapeutic technique in which a therapist tries to call forth a client's obsessive thoughts again and again, with the expectation that the thoughts will eventually lose their power to frighten and thus to cause anxiety.

A neurotransmitter whose abnormal activity is linked to depression, OCD, and eating disorders.

A neurotransmitter that helps modify or regulate the effect of other neurotransmitters.

A region of the brain in which impulses involving excretion, sexuality, violence, and other primitive activites normally arise.

Structures in the brain, within the region known as the basal ganglia, that help convert sensory information into thoughts and actions.

An approach to treating generalized and other anxiety disorders that teaches clients techniques for reducing and controlling stress.