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| Research article summary (published 30 Dec 2008): |
The anxiety disorder spectrum: fear imagery, physiological reactivity, and differential diagnosis.
Full Abstract
This review considers recent research assessing psychophysiological reactivity to fear imagery in anxiety disorder patients. As in animal subjects, fear cues prompt in humans a state of defensive motivation in which autonomic and somatic survival reflexes are markedly enhanced. Thus, a startle stimulus presented in a fear context yields a stronger (potentiated) reflex, providing a quantitative measure of fearful arousal. This fear potentiation is further exaggerated in specific or social phobia individuals when viewing pictures or imagining the phobic object. Paradoxically, fear imagery studies with more severe anxiety disorder patients--panic disorder with agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, or anxious patients with comorbid depression--show a blunted, less robust fear potentiated response. Furthermore, this reflex blunting appears to systematically be more pronounced over the anxiety disorder spectrum, coincident with lengthier chronicity, worsening clinician-based judgments of severity and prognosis, and increased questionnaire-based indices of negative affectivity, suggesting that normal defensive reactivity may be compromised by an experience of long-term stress.
Author information
Author/s: Lang, Peter J (PJ); McTeague, Lisa M (LM);
Affiliation: Center for the Study of Emotion & Attention, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA. plang(-atsign-)phhp.ufl.edu
Grants: F31 MH 069048 (Agency:NIMH NIH HHS) ; P50 MH 72850 (Agency:NIMH NIH HHS)
Journal and publication information
Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Review
Journal: Anxiety, stress, and coping (Anxiety Stress Coping), published in England. (Language: eng)
Reference: 2009-Jan; vol 22 (issue 1) : pp 5-25
Dates: Created 2008/12/19; Completed 2009/03/11; Revised 2009/10/27;
PMID: 19096959, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 10/28/2009, IMS Date: 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00)
Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.
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