Health Sciences 4091A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Future Orientation, Palpitations, Mental Disorder
11 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Intensity and disorder are two somewhat related but conceptually independent dimensions. There needs to be a distinct boundary between disorder and non-disorder. Physiological: breathing difficulties, heart palpitations, trembling hands, sweating, dizziness. Some general features characterize almost all expressions of anxiety: instantaneous activation, low threshold: biased toward perceiving threats, responsiveness to unusual and uncertain situations: particularly apparent in novel, surprising, and ambiguous stimuli, future orientation: anticipatory emotion. Any situation that leads to perceptions of urgent, mortal danger induces intense and immediate anxiety among normal people. Three general indicators of disordered anxiety mechanisms: anxiety without appropriate cause, excessiveness of anxious response, deficient amounts of fear (rare) Social fears: other people are one of the most common sources of anxiety. The evolutionary view emphasizes how the foundation for distinguishing normality and abnormality lies in how and why we are biologically designed to be the way we are.
