Psychology for Dummies (62 page)

Scared sweaterless

People can worry about or fear all kinds of things. When someone is extremely afraid of a particular thing or situation, even if he or she knows it poses no real danger, we call that a
phobia.
There are different types of phobias. Social phobia is the fear of people. Agoraphobia is the fear of being outdoors or in crowded places. Angoraphobia is fear of sweaters and heavy winter coats. I was just kidding about the last one, but hundreds of phobias are out there. Here are a few notables:

Acrophobia:
Fear of heights

Claustrophobia:
Fear of closed spaces

Nyctophobia:
Fear of the dark

Mysophobia:
Fear of germ contamination

Zoophobia:
Fear of animals or a specific animal

There are at least two excellent explanations of panic disorder, David Barlow’s
biopsychosocial approach
and the
cognitive model.

Barlow’s main idea is that panic attacks are the result of an overreactive fear response within the brain under stress. Certain individuals possess a physiological vulnerability in which their nervous systems sometimes overreact. This biological vulnerability is paired with the psychological vulnerability caused by exaggerated beliefs that regard certain bodily sensations and the world, in general, as dangerous and the misperception (hopefully) regarding the dangerousness of the world in general.

The cognitive model (Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, 1985) is very similar to Barlow’s model, but it emphasizes the person’s beliefs more. The basic idea is that panic attacks are the result of a misattribution of normal bodily sensations that leads to increased fear, which in turn exacerbates the sensations, which in turn leads to more misattribution. It’s like a vicious cycle. A person interprets something that he feels as life threatening or dangerous, which makes him worry and intensifies both the feeling and his fear of it.

Panic disorder is treated with both medications and various forms of psycho- therapy. Antidepressant medications known as tricyclics have been used successfully to reduce the occurrence of panic. Benzodiazapines, a class of “relaxing” drugs, also have been used successfully.

Behavior therapy has been highly successful with panic patients. It sounds kind of cruel, but behavior therapy basically involves teaching relaxation techniques and then in small-step increments, exposing patients to situations that formerly triggered panic and teaching them to endure the panic attack until it subsides. It sounds like torture, but it works. Cognitive therapy also has been used to teach sufferers to change their thinking in ways that reduce their tendency to misperceive or misinterpret their bodily sensations and blow them out of proportion. The intent is to change “what if thinking” to “so what thinking” through education regarding both physiological processes and available sources of help, if needed.