Psychology and Phobias
I am currently a psychology major, and I like reading and learning about human behavior. Everything we do in life is related to psychology. Psychology is basically the study of who we are, why we are that way, and also what we can become. I chose to write about articles that explain some psychological issues. The Journal of Genetic Psychology has many articles about behavior of different kinds. The three articles that I will explain each have different types of phobias. A phobia is a common type of anxiety disorder. Many people can have phobias of different kinds. Examples of phobias that I will explain are fear of earthquakes and fear of being social with others.
“Reducing Earthquake-Related Fears in Victim and Nonvictim Children” is an article that includes the study to measure fear. To do this, the authors used a powerful study technique known as the activity-based cognitive fear reduction (ABCF) by using the Fear Survey Schedule for Children (FSSC). The FSSC consisted of gathering data from 266 participants to determine the different types of fear characteristics of children between the ages of 8-12 years. The ABCF was a nine-session procedure that hoped to reduce children’s earthquake related fears. The authors hypothesized that this intervention scheme would be substantially different from a post event debriefing intervention, which usually occurs immediately after a traumatic event (Karairmak and Aydin). The results showed that earthquake victim children were more fearful on two subtests of the FSSC than were nonvictim children and that girls had significantly higher scores on all subscales of the FSSC than the boys.
“Reducing Earthquake-Related Fears in Victim and Nonvictim Children” discussed children with fear of earthquakes, while, another article, “Work Characteristics and Social Phobia in a Nationally Representative Employed Sample” discussed social phobia. This article is talks about fear of being social with others. The objective of the article was that social phobia is associated with long-term impairment and disability (Stansfeld et al.). This is the first study to look at the connection of work characteristics with social phobia in a population. Self-reported work characteristics were linked to 12-month social phobia diagnosed by the World Mental Health Composite International Diagnostic Interview in 2004, 324 were employed individuals from the Canadian Community Health Survey (Stansfeld et al.). What the authors concluded was interesting. Job insecurity may be a result of illness in employment populations, while on the other hand high job pressure may also increase the risk of symptoms.
“Work Characteristics and Social Phobia in a Nationally Representative Employed Sample” is connected to another article that discussed social anxiety disorder, specific phobia and fear conditioning in healthy individuals. In this article, “Functional Neuroimaging of Anxiety: A Meta-analysis of Emotional Processing in PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Specific Phobia,” the authors searched for common and disorder-specific functional neurobiological deficits in several anxiety disorders (Etkin and Wager). The main point of this article is that the study of human anxiety disorders has benefited greatly from functional neuroimaging approaches.
Furthermore, the fear of earthquakes and the fear of being social are examples of phobias that people have. I learned that phobias can occur when someone experiences a traumatic event, as in the article of the fear of earthquakes. Human behavior is a very important subject that should be experimented with because we need to figure out how and why phobias exist. Without these experiments, nobody would know why people act a certain way to certain things. I also learned that many people can have different types of phobias. They may not even know that they are afraid of something until they actually experience it. From the articles that I discussed, I now know the importance of the study of behavior.
Work Cited
Amit Etkin, Tor D Wager. (2007). Functional Neuroimaging of Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis of
Emotional Processing in PTSD, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Specific Phobia. The
American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(10), 1476-88. Retrieved November 6, 2008, from
Research Library database. (Document ID: 1360500841).
Özlem Karairmak, Gül Aydin. (2008). Reducing Earthquake-Related Fears in Victim and
Nonvictim Children. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 169(2), 177-85. Retrieved
November 6, 2008, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 1489114251).
Stephen A Stansfeld, Emma Robertson Blackmore, Brandon M Zagorski, Sarah Munce,
Donna E Stewart, Iris Weller. (2008). Work Characteristics and Social Phobia in a
Nationally Representative Employed Sample. Canadian Journal of
Psychiatry, 53(6), 371-6. Retrieved November 6, 2008, from Research Library database.
(Document ID: 1521969881).
No comments:
Post a Comment