Anxiety Disorders

Separation Anxiety: overwhelming fear of losing or becoming separated from major attachment figures through catastrophic means

Social anxiety: fear of social situations (especially where one is exposed to judgement)

Anxiety, fear, panic #

Anxiety is a future-oriented emotion characterized by feelings of apprehension and lack of control over upcoming events that might be threatening.

• may be non-specific: general sense of dread about something unknown that might happen

Fear is a present-oriented reaction to current danger.

• feelings of alarm
• urge to escape

Panic: group of physical symptoms of flight/fight response that occurs unexpectedly in the absence of any obvious threat or danger

• similar symptoms to a heart attack

Etiology #

• Temperament vulnerability: shyness and behavioral inhibition
• Behavioral learning processes: parents, caretakers demonstrate adverse conditioning (children learn to be afraid of the same things)
  • also involves observational and verbal learning/modeling
• Socialization processes: overprotective, overcontrolling, intrusive, or negative/critical parenting

The above three all lead to biased information processing: selective attention, memory bias, and negative cognitive errors

• negative information is remembered much more than positive information
• belief that everyone else also remembers your mistakes

Treatment #

Individual child therapy: skill based, cognitive-behavioral treatment

• exposure therapy: learn to ignore false alarms, directly confront alarms and prompt learning from those events

Parent/family intervention: