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v s

Phobia - 0 views

www.sanjanasaraf.com/fear-phobia.html

phobia fear overcome fear phobias phobia treatment

shared by v s on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • v s on 18 Mar 12
     
    Fear is a natural in born response of all living beings. When fear becomes frequent, intense and unreasonable it comes to be classified as phobia.
nat bas

Understanding the Anxious Mind - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...04anxiety-t.html

anxiety psychology brain emotional_control

shared by nat bas on 03 Oct 09 - No Cached
  • But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always mentally preparing for doom. They are just born worriers, their brains forever anticipating the dropping of some dreaded other shoe. For the past 20 years, Kagan and his colleagues have been following hundreds of such people, beginning in infancy, to see what happens to those who start out primed to fret. Now that these infants are young adults, the studies are yielding new information about the anxious brain.
  • Four significant long-term longitudinal studies are now under way: two at Harvard that Kagan initiated, two more at the University of Maryland under the direction of Nathan Fox, a former graduate student of Kagan’s. With slight variations, they all have reached similar conclusions: that babies differ according to inborn temperament; that 15 to 20 percent of them will react strongly to novel people or situations; and that strongly reactive babies are more likely to grow up to be anxious.
  • In the brain, these thoughts can often be traced to overreactivity in the amygdala, a small site in the middle of the brain that, among its many other functions, responds to novelty and threat. When the amygdala works as it should, it orchestrates a physiological response to changes in the environment. That response includes heightened memory for emotional experiences and the familiar chest pounding of fight or flight. But in people born with a particular brain circuitry, the kind seen in Kagan’s high-reactive study subjects, the amygdala is hyperreactive, prickly as a haywire motion-detector light that turns on when nothing’s moving but the rain. Other physiological changes exist in children with this temperament, many of them also related to hyperreactivity in the amygdala. They have a tendency to more activity in the right hemisphere, the half of the brain associated with negative mood and anxiety; greater increases in heart rate and pupil dilation in response to stress; and on occasion higher levels of the stress hormones cortisol and norepinephrine.
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  • The physiological measurements led them to believe something biological was at work. Their hypothesis: the inhibited children were “born with a lower threshold” for arousal of various brain regions, in particular the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the circuit responsible for the stress hormone cortisol.
  • At age 4, children who had been high-reactive were four times as likely to be behaviorally inhibited as those who had been low-reactive. By age 7, almost half of the jittery babies had developed symptoms of anxiety — fear of thunder or dogs or darkness, extreme shyness in the classroom or playground — compared with just 10 percent of the more easygoing ones. About one in five of the high-reactive babies were consistently inhibited and fearful at every visit up to the age of 7.
  • By adolescence, the rate of anxiety in Kagan’s study subjects declined overall, including in the high-risk group. At 15, about two-thirds of those who had been high-reactors in infancy behaved pretty much like everybody else.
  • PEOPLE WITH A nervous temperament don’t usually get off so easily, Kagan and his colleagues have found. There exists a kind of sub-rosa anxiety, a secret stash of worries that continue to plague a subset of high-reactive people no matter how well they function outwardly. They cannot quite outrun their own natures: consciously or unconsciously, they remain the same uneasy people they were when they were little.
  • Teenagers who were in the group at low risk for anxiety showed no increase in activity in the amygdala when they looked at the face, even if they had been told to focus on their own fear. But those in the high-risk group showed increased activity in the amygdala when they were thinking about their own feelings (though not when they were thinking about the nose). Once again, this pattern was seen in anxiety-prone youngsters quite apart from whether they had problems with anxiety in their daily lives. In the high-risk kids, even those who were apparently calm in most settings, their amygdalas lighted up more than the others’ did.
  • Behaviorally inhibited children were much more likely to have older siblings: two-thirds of them did, compared with just one-third of the uninhibited children. Could having older siblings, he and his co-authors wondered, mean being teased and pushed, which becomes a source of chronic stress, which in turn amplifies a biological predisposition to inhibition?
  • high-reactive babies who went to day care when they were young were significantly less fearful at age 4 than were the high-reactives who stayed home with their mothers.
  • The predictive power of an anxiety-prone temperament, such as it is, essentially works in just one direction: not by predicting what these children will become but by predicting what they will not. In the longitudinal studies of anxiety, all you can say with confidence is that the high-reactive infants will not grow up to be exuberant, outgoing, bubbly or bold. Still, while a Sylvia Plath almost certainly won’t grow up to be a Bill Clinton, she can either grow up to be anxious and suicidal, or simply a poet. Temperament is important, but life intervenes.
  • nat bas on 03 Oct 09
     
    This is a good article that looks at how anxiety happens- it is more or less something you are born with, but you learn to live with, if you are intelligent about it. Liked it. Good writing.
thinkahol *

How to size up the people in your life - opinion - 15 August 2011 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...p-the-people-in-your-life.html

How to size up the people in your life - opinion 15 August 2011 New Scientist

shared by thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 19 Aug 11
     
    Why are we all so different? Here is a toolkit for finding out what people are really like IN THE 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and successor, wrote a book about personality. The project was motivated by his interest in what he considered a very puzzling question: "Why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character?" Not knowing how to get at the answer, Theophrastus decided to instead focus on categorising those seemingly mysterious differences in personality. The result was a book of descriptions of personality types to which he assigned names such as The Suspicious, The Fearful and The Proud. The book made such an impression that it was passed down through the ages, and is still available online today as The Characters of Theophrastus. The two big questions about personality that so interested Theophrastus are the same ones we ask ourselves about the people we know: why do we have different personalities? And what is the best way to describe them? In the past few decades, researchers have been gradually answering these questions, and in my new book, Making Sense of People: Decoding the mysteries of personality, I take a look at some of these answers. When it comes to the origins of personality, we have learned a lot. We now know that personality traits are greatly influenced by the interactions between the set of gene variants that we happen to have been born with and the social environment we happen to grow up in. The gene variants that a person inherits favour certain behavioural tendencies, such as assertiveness or cautiousness, while their environmental circumstances influence the forms these innate behavioural tendencies take. The ongoing dialogue between the person's genome and environment gradually establishes the enduring ways of thinking and feeling that are the building blocks of personality. This de
thinkahol *

Why Are We Often Terrified of Our Own Sexuality? | Sex & Relationships | AlterNet - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...terrified_of_our_own_sexuality

sex relationship sexuality fear

shared by thinkahol * on 05 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 05 Aug 10
     
    While so much about sexuality is brazenly public these days, we haven't advanced very far in our ability to talk about our sexual fears and anxieties.
franstassigny

Spellbound et psychanalyse / Spellbound and Psychoanalysis - 0 views

fr.calameo.com/...0013433883d665e1b9a27

shared by franstassigny on 16 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • franstassigny on 16 Jan 13
     
    This paper was presented at the Alfred Hitchcock conference For the Love of Fear convened by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, held from 31 March to 2 April 2000. * * * Hermia: Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double… Demetrius: Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. A Midsummer Night's Dream, IV, ii, 192-197. Just about everything about Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) seems double, not least the film's critical reputation. On the one hand, Andrew Britton, not a man to equivocate, declares that "one can make no claim forSpellbound as an achieved work of art," citing, among its shortcomings, "the discrepancy between surface and implication, the grotesque uncertainty of tone (especially noticeable in the wildly clashing conventions of the acting) and the frequent banality of the script" (83). Many, even among Hitchcock's admirers, would agree.Spellbound is, in fact, not spellbinding, not one of Hitchcock's masterworks, not a Rear Window (1954) nor aVertigo (1958). On the other hand, though, it is, as Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague point out, the first of Hitchcock's films in which "questions of visualization and displacement, of guilt conjured up and denied - questions which will eventually inform such films as Rear Window and Vertigo - become overt subject matter"
v s

Panic Attack - 0 views

www.sanjanasaraf.com/panic-attack.html

panic attack anxiety attack panic

shared by v s on 18 Mar 12 - Cached
  • v s on 18 Mar 12
     
    A panic attack is a sudden attack of anxiety dominated by its physical symptoms along with a strong fear of a serious medical condition like a heart attack.
Robert Kamper

Science News / Don't Worry, Get Attention Training - 0 views

www.sciencenews.org/...orry%2C_get_attention_training

anxiety disorder

shared by Robert Kamper on 19 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Attention training helps subjects practice how not to focus on threatening words or on photos of threatening faces
  • anxiety disorder to achieve remission. The disorder, estimated to affect 6.8 million U.S. adults, involves constant, exaggerated worries about impending disasters regarding health, money or other issues.
  • A similar form of attention guidance, directed by psychologist Norman Schmidt of Florida State University in Tallahassee, provided marked relief for many patients diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. About 15 million U.S. adults struggle with this condition, which is characterized by a debilitating dread of everyday social situations and a fear of being watched and judged by others.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • attention training requires minimal professional supervision, causes no side effects and could be completed over the Internet.
  • Amir and Schmidt hypothesize that a habitual focus on potentially threatening events or situations causes the pervasive fear typical of anxiety disorders.
  • Robert Kamper on 19 Feb 09
     
    attention training studies indicate technique works in reducing anxiety disorders
Sarah Eeee

Hey interwebs! Can I have my brain back? | Ask MetaFilter - 0 views

ask.metafilter.com/...rwebs-Can-I-have-my-brain-back

shared by Sarah Eeee on 30 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • What is it that makes the Internet so compelling to so many? Aside from the obvious fun and entertainment, educational and business opportunities, and show-offism; I think it boils down to a slogan taken from the eighties. No fear! The playing field is level. Size doesn't matter, really. Inhibitions and reservations are out the window. Internet life is people with diseases and addictions, exposing souls and sharing their recoveries. It's about overviews of history warning future generations not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors. Sure there are a few kooks to throw us off guard, but mostly the Net is just us being ourselves without fear of reprisal. How refreshing. The Internet is people talking and sharing ideas. Our best and brightest, wallflowers and flower children, the girl next door and the Doc who delivered your kids. It's about you and me. We are all using our own cognizant voices, and we're listening too. We're challenging the status quo, and we're offering alternatives. Collaboration on a global scale all tied together by that simplest of cyber friendships, the hyperlink. Communication has never seen anything like it. I first considered all this ten years ago when that sociology study came out. Another ten years later, my life is even more enriched by the Internet. So to answer your question, I don't think it's the Internet that has whacked your brain, I think you might want to be looking elsewhere. If anything, the Internet is keeping you stimulated.
    • Sarah Eeee
      Sarah Eeee on 30 Dec 10
       
      Some Metafilter users opinions on the Internet and attention span. Netbros takes a very optimistic approach, highlighting the wonderful communication realities & possibilities of the Internet. Still, I can't help but be convinced that my attention span has decreased as social networking has taken up an increasing proportion of my Internet use. When I was 10-11 years old (got my first computer with Internet access), I spent most of my time reading relatively long websites about all sorts of things. (Granted, I had been the kind of kid who read the encyclopedia and lots of non-fiction before we got a computer.) I'm 23 now, and my desktop is usually awash with tabs of news, blog posts, social networking sites, and an array of links I found from these aforementioned places. I hate to blame Twitter, Facebook, email, or any other social networking application. But still - I feel like my attention span has decreased, at a developmental stage when it should likely have increased (going from 10 years old to 23). What are your thoughts?
Janice Fischbach

Liberating Ministries for Christ International - 0 views

www.lmci.org/articles.cfm

shared by Janice Fischbach on 28 Jun 12 - No Cached
    • Janice Fischbach
      Janice Fischbach on 28 Jun 12
       
      what we call a "trigger"
  • hormones that are released then cause panic, increased respiration, adrenaline flow, headache, acid indigestion, etc. The prefrontal cortex is bypassed in assessing the situation because the triggered memory has already been recorded as a dire emergency. When the anxiety reaches the hypothalamus, the body will respond accordingly.
  • In other words, fear can be remedied by action but anxiety can only be remedied by strong hope.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Psalm 119:114 says, "Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word."
  • The antidote for anxiety is to memorize Scripture to prevent the apprehension from reaching the place where the body reacts.
  • When anxiety begins to run in someone's brain, a plethora of Scripture needs to flood the mind before the chemicals get a chance to be secreted.
  • We need more memorized Bible verses and less TV and movies.
  • We need greater discipline of the mind than devotion to recreation.
  • (John 8:32
  • two main reasons:
  • Perilous times are upon us and are getting worse day by day
  • Undisciplined minds are at an all-time high also.
  • We may not be able to stop trying times from coming, but we can be prepared for them when they come.
  • 2 Timothy 3:1
Michael Britt

The 4 Words That Will Get Your Email Opened | Copyblogger - 0 views

www.copyblogger.com/get-your-email-opened

shared by Michael Britt on 27 Dec 11 - No Cached
    • Michael Britt
      Michael Britt on 27 Dec 11
       
      "The need to belong" - sounds like the 3rd level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
    • Michael Britt
      Michael Britt on 27 Dec 11
       
      Interesting point. I can't point to a specific psychological theory, but feeling understood does seem to be a powerful experience. I guess there could be a little Carl Rogers in here (unconditional positive regard).
    • Michael Britt
      Michael Britt on 27 Dec 11
       
      This one is very true. Fear of loss is a powerful motivator - for better and worse.
Heather McQuaid

BPS Research Digest: The new science of "Phew!" - 0 views

bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/...new-science-of-phew.html

psychology brain

shared by Heather McQuaid on 11 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Roughly half the group described a "near-miss" kind of relief - rather like fearing that you've locked yourself out and then realising that you haven't. The other half described a kind of "task-completion" relief, in which a negative experience had come to an end.
  • near-miss relief was associated with having more thoughts about how much worse things could have been and feeling more socially isolated
  • xcessive rumination can be harmful to close relationships. Experience of task-completion relief, by contrast, was associated with more thoughts about how things could have been even better.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Experiencing near-miss relief could increase the likelihood that people will act to avert an unfavourable fate in the future" Sweeny and Vohs said. "In contrast, task-completion relief allows people to focus on the positive emotional experience with minimal distraction from downward counterfactual thoughts. This process might reinforce satisfaction in the completion of a job well done ... and therefore increase the likelihood that people will repeat the unpleasant experience."
  • Heather McQuaid on 11 Jun 12
     
    It's better to complete a scary task than to have the sense of relief of a "near miss"
Michael Britt

UOCD: Introduction Understanding Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. - 0 views

understanding_ocd.tripod.com/ocd_introduction.html

ocd

shared by Michael Britt on 14 Jan 10 - Cached
  • OCD is 1 of the 5 Anxiety Disorders
  • what drives the OCD: Anxiety, Fear (Thus OCD being categorized as an Anxiety Disorder.)
  • You have the many different types of OCD symptoms which can be subdivided in 2 groups: the Obsessions and the Compulsions
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the Obsession may trigger a Compulsion
  • This is sometimes referred to as the the OCD Cycle.
Sarah Eeee

Online Medical Advice Can Be a Prescription for Fear - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...06FOB-Medium-t.html

medical publichealth health_care health consumerhealth

shared by Sarah Eeee on 07 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Sarah Eeee on 07 Feb 11
     
    NYT column comparing WebMD to the Mayo Clinic's consumer health site. Emphasizes WebMD's (to me, obvious) "hypochrondria fearmongering" as well as Mayo's reliability. These characteristics certainly apply to the entries for psychological problems on both sites. As a medical librarian, I also recommend medlineplus.gov.
  • Sarah Eeee on 07 Feb 11
     
    Good column on WebMD versus Mayo's consumer health site.
seth morris

Taking a Ride to Funky Town With Legal Highs - 1 views

Life is boring if we take things seriously. We should also have the time to enjoy it at its fullest. With legal highs, the feelings we get are like taking a ride to funky town where we no longer th...

legal highs

started by seth morris on 22 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
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