A multicomponent investigation of the interaction of generalized anxiety and phobia

Forty female undergraduates forming four groups, high or low trait anxiety with or without a specific fear (rats), participated in a psychophysiological assessment of their response to the phobic object, a neutral object (rabbit), and to a general anxiety-induction procedure (threat of shock). Subjects also completed a number of tasks requiring sustained attention. Blood samples were drawn to determine thyroid hormone (T3 and T4) levels. Trait anxiety was found to interact with specific fear in response to the feared object. The high-trait anxious/high-fear group was most physiologically responsive to the rat. Trait- anxious subjects were more responsive to the threat of shock and showed performance deficits on reaction time, vigilance, and backward digit span tasks. These subjects also had significantly higher T3 and T4 levels. The findings are discussed with regard to the role of general anxiety in the etiology and/or maintenance of specific fears and the role of thyroid hormones in accentuating physiological response to feared stimuli.     

Worth the risk? Fear of being single and willingness to make risky health decisions in sex and dating contexts

Does fear of being single (FOBS) predict risky health behaviors when such behavior could promote pursuit of a romantic connection? Study 1 tested general tendencies toward taking health risks associated with FOBS. Study 2 tested how those with stronger FOBS navigated romantic versus non-romantic risk behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study 3 extended the test of risky behavior beyond the pandemic to test whether FOBS was associated with willingness to engage in risky sexual behavior. Despite nonsignificant associations with taking health risks more generally, FOBS was associated with greater willingness to engage in risky behaviors in dating contexts, particularly when considering their willingness to settle for less in relationships. This research provides novel insight into dating choices associated with stronger FOBS and how willingness to settle predicts risky health behavior when it could appeal to romantic prospects.     

The influence of event-time (vs. clock-time) scheduling style on satiation

Consumers often need to schedule different activities. While consumers who adopt a clock-time scheduling style decide when to transition from one activity to the next according to external temporal cues (e.g., clock), those who adopt an event-time scheduling style tend to perform each activity until they feel internally that it is completed. This research showed that consumers' scheduling style (clock-time vs. event-time) could influence their satiation with repeated consumption. Four studies involving actual consumption across various domains (e.g., music, artwork, food) demonstrated that an event-time scheduling style leads to more rapid satiation with repeated consumption than a clock-time scheduling style because event-timers (vs. clock-timers) have higher private self-focus. The results further revealed that the satiation effect of scheduling style is mitigated when consumers are distracted from their private self or informed of additional sensitization cues in the consumption stimuli.     

女性生理周期对条件性恐惧习得和消退的影响

动物研究显示, 雌激素调节条件性恐惧习得和消退, 但是, 人类的性激素对条件性恐惧习得和消退的影响还不太清楚。因此, 本研究以大学生为研究对象, 考察女性不同生理周期对条件性情境恐惧的习得和消退的影响。20名经前期和20名经期女被试暴露于3种情境下：无厌恶刺激情境(N)、可预测情境(P)和不可预测情境(U), 预测此3种情境下是否出现厌恶刺激。以在线索条件下和无线索条件下对厌恶刺激的主观预期值为因变量。研究结果显示:在习得阶段, 经期女性在P情境下的条件性线索恐惧的主观预期值高于经前期女性; 经前期女性在3种情境下的条件性情境恐惧的主观预期值都高于经期女性, 但只在N情境和P情境, 与经期女性相比, 经前期女性对厌恶刺激的主观预期值存在显著差异。在消退阶段, 与经期女性相比, 经前期女性在3种情境下的条件性情境恐惧的主观预期值更高, 且经前期女性对厌恶刺激的主观预期值在N情境和P情境显著高于经期女性。该结果显示, 经前期女性对条件性情境恐惧易习得难消退, 表明此生理阶段的性激素影响大脑的情绪调节功能, 从而影响条件性情境恐惧。     

条件性恐惧记忆提取消退干预范式

提取消退(retrieval-extinction, Ret+Ext)范式是基于记忆再巩固理论, 利用消退训练(extinction, Ext)能改变条件刺激(conditioned stimulus, CS)的恐惧效价特点, 把消退训练应用到再巩固时间窗内来改写(rewrite)恐惧记忆, 消除恐惧反应。提取消退范式是对传统暴露疗法和药物治疗的创新和拓展, 不仅为创伤性记忆的治疗提供一种非侵入性的技术, 而且也为改写人类记忆、积极心理学探索人类幸福感方面开辟了一种全新的理论视角。     

The psychodynamic of panic attacks: A useful integration of psychoanalysis and neuroscience1

This article tries to explain, in the light of some neuroscientific and psychoanalytical considerations, the repetitive pattern of panic attacks. Freud considered the panic attack as an ‘actual neurosis’ not involving any conflictual process. Recent neuroscientific findings indicate that psychosomatic reactions, set off by a danger situation, depend on the primitive circuit of fear (including the amygdala) characterised by its speed, but lack accurate responses and may also be activated by harmless stimuli perceived erroneously as dangerous. The traumatic terror is stored in implicit memory and may be set off by a conditioned stimulus linked to a previous danger situation. In the panic attack, the traumatic event is created by the imagination and this construction (a micro‐delusion), built in loneliness and anxiety, has the same power as the real trauma. A mutual psychosomatic short‐circuit between body and psyche, in which terror reinforces the somatic reactions and the psychic construction, is established. Therefore, it is important to highlight these constructions in order to analyse and transform them. In the second part of the article the author reviews the main psychoanalytical theories about panic attacks, stressing how, in his opinion, panic attack is a consequence of the breakdown of the defence organisation at various levels and may appear during periods of life crisis. Two patients suffering from a deficit of personal identity are presented. The various organisations and the different levels (biological, neuroscientific, associative, traumatic) of the panic attack determine different kinds of therapeutic approaches (pharmacological, cognitive and psychoanalytical). While the psychopharmacological treatment is aimed at reducing the neurovegetative reaction and the cognitive method is attempting to correct the associative and perceptive processes of fear signals, psychoanalytical therapy represents both a specific means to free patients from panic attacks as well as an indispensable route for their emotional growth.     

Survival of the Fittest: Rhetoric During the Course of an Election Campaign

Despite the tradition of studying campaign effects, we know little about the rhetorical strategies of candidates. This study speculates about the types of appeals that incumbents and challengers find most effective and that are, as a result, most likely to dominate an election campaign. Candidates have an incentive to use arguments that evoke emotions such as fear, anxiety, and anger. Emotional appeals allow candidates to emphasize consensual values, which makes it easier to mobilize their party's base while simultaneously attracting the support of the uncommitted. The use of emotional appeals is also consistent with the media's preference for drama and excitement in news reporting. Thus, emotional appeals will be more enduring than other types of appeals, and hence more likely to dominate the rhetorical landscape. A content analysis of newspaper coverage of the 1988 Canadian federal election campaign provides suggestive evidence in favor of this view.     

Early trauma and narcissism—autism bipolarity1

The analyst makes a series of considerations taken a posteriori from the analysis of a small number of patients. These patients have saved themselves from an early narcissistic catastrophe by developing precocious mental processes, while affective relationships rudimentarily repeat the impact with the original trauma. Primitive defences, essentially denial and vertical splitting, dissociate the tear in the psyche and structure a narcissism–autism bipolarity, revealed in aspects of the character which oblige the patient to automatically repeat a single matrix of experience. In therapy, it is necessary to construct a rst time of the trauma, by pending and linking threads of the primary relationship and strengthening them in the analytic relationship. This reconstruction of the background, a screen to project what had originally been rejected, is the prerequisite for coming out, in deferred action, from the hold of the pathological identifications. The author dedicates particular attention to the undifferentiated background, the nature‐environment torn by the trauma, and to the need to reconstruct this fabric of experience in the analytical relationship, as a fundamental element to the recomposition of the dissociated nuclei. In the clinical case, the analyst describes in particular how the analyst's words encounter an unbridgeable gap, a failure in the capacity for representation when opening the autistic nucleus. Through a regression lasting for about a year, a patient was able to live the experience of primitive agonies and that of an unbearable helplessness and, at the same time, was able to feel how the analyst supported her sense of existence. Subsequently, the patient was able to give shape, through visual images, to deep states of being and start the process of metabolising and symbolising the trauma.     

A predictive model for psychological reactions to crime in Italy: an analysis of fear of crime and concern about crime as a social problem

In this study a model for predicting fear of crime (FC) and concern about crime as a social problem (CC) in Italy has been built, using three sets of independent variables concerning: (a) the sociodemographic and criminal victimization domain; (b) the psychosocial domain; and (c) the mass media. A secondary analysis on data gathered by the Observatory of the North‐West (N = 3262, a mail panel that is representative of the Italian population over 18) has been performed. Results showed that FC and CC are related yet distinct constructs: FC is less widespread than CC, and has different predictors. FC predictors are sociodemographic, psychosocial and, above all, victimization variables; whereas mass media and psychosocial variables predict CC. Results were compared with the literature on the topic. Implications, limitations, and future directions are discussed. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simul What? Toward a Grace for the Fearful

The doctrines of forensic justification and simul iustus et peccator assume a primarily moral theo‐cosmology. However, the former constricts the excessiveness of divine grace, while the latter fails to adequately capture the fullness of the human condition. Freeing divine grace and theological anthropology from the moral requires a shift in emphasis toward suffering and an acknowledgment that a deep root of sin is creaturely vulnerability. In this case, the incurved self might symbolize the fearful, pulling goods toward the self for protection. While accountability for sin remains important, the first response to the fearful, who act from a sense of deep vulnerability, is compassion rather than judgment. In this way grace attends to but ultimately exceeds the moral.