AP® Psychology · Unit 5 · Topic 5.4
Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety disorders happen when the body's emergency alarm system fires too often, too intensely, or at the wrong times, and avoiding the trigger brings quick relief but locks the fear in place.
The fight-or-flight response exists to save your life when a real threat shows up: heart rate spikes, breathing quickens, muscles tense, ready to run or fight. Anxiety disorders happen when that same system switches on without a real emergency, or stays on far longer than the situation calls for. The five major types differ mainly in what triggers the fear and how broad it is. Specific phobia targets one object or situation, like snakes or heights. Social anxiety disorder centers on fear of judgment or embarrassment in front of others. Panic disorder involves sudden, intense attacks that feel like they come out of nowhere, plus fear of having another one. Agoraphobia is fear of being trapped or unable to escape, often avoiding public places, and frequently develops alongside panic disorder. Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is the broadest: constant, free-floating worry about many areas of life with no single trigger.
A panic attack follows a predictable arc. Symptoms build fast, usually peaking within about ten minutes, with a racing heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, chest tightness, and a sense of doom or losing control. The body cannot sustain that level of arousal forever, so it naturally comes back down over the following minutes even if nothing is done. The problem is what happens next: avoidance. Skipping the place or situation that triggered the fear brings instant relief, and that relief is negatively reinforcing, so the avoidance behavior gets stronger each time. But avoidance also blocks the one thing that could shrink the fear: direct experience that the situation is survivable. The anxiety disorder deepens.
Culture shapes how anxiety shows up. Display rules affect whether anxiety is expressed physically, through stomachaches or dizziness, or psychologically, through worry and fear talk, and some cultures have anxiety presentations tied to specific cultural concepts of distress. This connects directly to treatment: exposure therapy treats the fear by applying extinction from classical conditioning.
Key terms
- Negative reinforcement
- A behavior increases because it removes or reduces something unpleasant, like escaping anxiety by avoiding a feared situation.
- Extinction
- The weakening of a learned response when the conditioned stimulus repeatedly appears without the original aversive consequence.
- Panic attack
- A sudden surge of intense fear with physical symptoms like racing heart and shortness of breath, usually peaking within about ten minutes.
- Agoraphobia
- Fear of being in places or situations where escape might be difficult or help unavailable, often leading to avoiding public spaces.
- Exposure therapy
- A treatment that has a person repeatedly face a feared stimulus without avoidance to weaken the fear response over time.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do specific phobia, agoraphobia, panic disorder, social anxiety, and generalized anxiety differ?
- How it worksWalk me through a panic attack rising and falling over about ten minutes.
- How it worksHow does avoidance make an anxiety disorder stronger through negative reinforcement?
- Going furtherWhat changes about how anxiety presents in cultures with different display rules?
- Ties togetherHow does exposure therapy connect to extinction in classical conditioning?
Check yourself
End of topic.