PSYC 412 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Orlando Bloom, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Anxiety Disorder
14 May 2018
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PSYC 412: Developmental Psychopathology
Feb 19th, 2018
Lecture 12: Anxiety Disorders II
• Course of anxiety disorders
o They tend to show different ages of onset:
▪ Separation anxiety tends to present younger (mean age 7-8yrs)
▪ OCD later onset (9-12yrs) but some will show it very early (6-10yrs)
earlier it shows more severe prognosis tends to be
▪ Generalized anxiety (10-14yrs)
▪ Social phobia – adolescence
▪ Panic disorder -adolescence
• Prognosis
o Research is still ongoing to determine long-term outcomes of anxiety disorders
▪ Homotypic continuity: having an anxiety disorder will put you at risk for a
subsequent anxiety disorder (may not be the same one)
▪ Heterotypic continuity: extent at which having anxiety disorder puts you
at risk for another type of disorder
o Data from study (Woodward & Fergusson 2001)
▪ Outcomes in early adulthood as a function of # of anxiety diagnoses as an
adolescent
▪ It puts you at risk for continued anxiety and depression as well as
substance use problems
▪ Decrease in people who started university, more drug dependence, etc.
• Clinical correlates
o What kind of functioning is impaired?
o Academic difficulties with children who have normal IQs
o There is an impact of worrying on concentration
o May refuse to go to school
▪ Or difficulty staying there
o Selective mutism
▪ Will not talk in specific social settings (to teachers, other peers)
o Social difficulties
▪ When kids are very young (preschool) being shy/withdrawn not a huge
problem w/ other kids but it becomes increasingly problematic as kids get
older
▪ More likely to experience peer victimization/peer rejection
▪ Shy/withdrawn children as likely as other children to have friends but
they perceive these relationships to be of lower quality
• Anxiety & mood disorders
o Strong links between anxiety & depression
▪ Highly co-morbid
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▪ In some clinical samples the comorbidity can be as high as 75% - meeting
criteria for both disorders
▪ Severely depressed youth are often as highly anxious
▪ Youth ith aiet oe likel tha outh ho do’t hae aiet to e
experiencing depression but there are some youth who have just anxiety
o Why do we see this strong comorbidity?
▪ Symptoms show significant overlap
• For example, generalized anxiety disorder & major depressive
disorder have: fatigue, sleep disturbance, irritability, difficulty
concentrating
o Possibly just the same underlying phenomenon
• Increased negative affectivity
o Extent to which a person feels distress
o Someone high on this will feel very strong negative
emotions, someone low will feel negative emotions less
strongly
o Dimensional: everyone is somewhere on a scale of
negative affectivity
o Both depression and anxiety associated w/ high levels of
negative affectivity
• Normal progression
o Anxiety comes first, subsequent development of
depression
o Is having an anxiety disorder in childhood a risk factor?
o E.g. anxiety is associated w/ dysfunctional social behaviors
(like avoidance)
o May also be that anxiety is associated with social-cognitive
processing patterns that may put children/adolescents at
risk for later depression
• Anxiety Disorders II (updated slides on myCourses)
• Etiology & maintenance of anxiety disorders in youth
o Two-stage theory of fear acquisition
▪ A model that proposes how phobia in particular gets started & then gets
maintained
▪ Happens in two stages:
• Stage 1. Fear develops through classical conditioning
o An unconditioned stimulus (US) that is a stimulus naturally
leading to a response
▪ E.g. food that leads to dogs drooling
o Unconditioned response happens in response to stimulus
(the drooling response)
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o Conditioned stimulus: a stimulus that was previously
neutral (e.g. a ell that oigiall did’t eliit a espose
from dog)
o Conditioned response: response to CS that results from
reliably pairing the CS and the US
▪ Teach a dog that when you ring bell, food is
coming. Eventually the dog will reliably pair the bell
with the food. Drooling at sound of the bell is the
conditioned response
▪ Ex: a very turbulent flight where the in-flight movie was Pirates of the
Caribbean
• After the flight was over I had a crush on Orlando Bloom which I
did not have before
• The unconditioned stimulus (US) was turbulence and the
unconditioned response (UR) was emotional arousal
• Conditioned stimulus (CS) was Orlando Bloom – he originally
elicited no response or reaction in me
• Following this I experienced emotional arousal every time I saw
Orlando bloom: the emotional arousal to him is the conditioned
response (CR) from the pairing
▪ Ex: in terms of a phobia: how might direct experience lead to dog phobia?
• CS: dogs; prior to this epeiee dogs do’t elial eliit a
response
• Dog gets paired with US: danger
• Child is scared by dog, pairs the dog with danger (US)
• The UR to danger naturally is fear
• But now the CS of the dog was gotten paired with the US of
danger, so now the fear the person experiences upon seeing a
dog is a CR
▪ Classical conditioning leads someone to have a fear response where no
fear response should be after pairing a neutral stimulus w/ danger
▪ Operant conditioning maintains it over time
▪ Stage 2: Avoidant behavior gets maintained through operant
conditioning
• Operant conditioning: adding or removing positive or negative
stimuli to change rates of behavior
• Avoidant behavior provides relief from anxiety
o A negative reinforce that removes the negative reinforcer
(negative reinforcement)
o Avoidant behavior increases, it feels good to get out of the
situatio so ou’ll do it agai
o People often will try to confront their fears, then get so
anxious that they bail out, and in that minute it feels so
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