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Anxiety and mood essay University Of Phoenix Psy 410 Kidd Colt Stacey Dixon April 26, 2010 Anxiety and mood essay What is anxiety and how is it affecting 18% of Americans today' Anxiety is explained to be one of the most common mental disorders to the U.S. population (Kessler et al., 2005). Anxiety is described as an unpleasant emotion that one may experience when in danger. There are two kinds of anxiety studied by psychologists: trait and state anxiety (Endler & Kocovski, 2001). Trait anxiety is how an individual responds to anxiety. An individual with high levels of trait anxiety would feel anxious majority of the time and an individual that has low trait anxiety would seldom feel anxious. State of anxiety is when an individual has a certain response when in a particular situation. Like the fear of seeing a snake. Both trait and state anxiety occurs along the continuum this is what determines if the anxiety that one feels is normal or abnormal. The continuum needs to be considered in order to define pathological anxiety because one person’s level of anxiety could be very different from another person’s level of anxiety. The common components of anxiety are emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physical. When focusing on and individuals level of anxiety we must break down the components into groups starting with how anxiety may make one feel and behave. Emotions are the core of an individual’s way of experiencing fear, anger, sadness, and enjoyment. Emotions are formed by our past and present experiences and are regulated in everyday life. With high levels of anxiety ones emotions might be uncontrollable. They would experience constant worry and negative stimuli emotions, and never clearly understanding why. Emotions can trigger physical symptoms such as, fast heart rate, Muscle tension, shakiness, and headaches. This type of anxiety could make an individual feel as though he or she is having a heart attack or a stroke. Emotional anxiety could lead to health issues and illnesses emotionally and physically. Ones behavior plays an important role when dealing with anxiety. Behavior is how one responds to the environment around him or her. Behavior is controlled by the endocrine system Anxiety and mood essay and the nervous system. The behavioral component describes three forms of learning such as operant conditioning which is learning based on reinforcement. Classical conditioning which is learning based on automatic mental associations. Modeling which is learning based on observation of others. The biological component is a huge part of explaining and treating anxiety disorders. The biological perspective would be considered panic attacks that could be activation from the fight-or-flight. A person that experiences repeated panic attacks suffer from fight-flight response. This response, consist of inappropriate reactions to certain situations, leaving the individual to panic and respond in an unconscious manner. The biological intervention would be Benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Valium. This is a treatment that would be for short term and not long term due to the fact it is highly addictive. People with anxiety disorders tend to misinterpret events in three important ways: they fixate on perceived dangers and threats, they overestimate the severity of the perceived danger or threat, and they drastically underestimate their ability to cope with the dangers and threats they perceive (Wells, 1997). Beliefs and assumptions are part of general thought patterns known as cognitive schemas (Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, 2005). There are maladaptive cognitive schemes and typical negative automatic thoughts. In this type of behavior, the cognitive therapist would take direct measures for the client for his or her problems. Moods are emotions that can affect individual, moods include your feelings of happiness or sadness, your state of optimism or pessimism, and your feelings of contentedness or dissatisfaction with a situation. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM IV TR) this is the classification of and known as mood affective classification system. Dissociative disorders are when an individual is disconnected from his or her personality do to stress, and some Anxiety and mood essay psychological functions are screened out and higher cognitive functioning such as language and intelligence are disturbed. A person with a somatoform disorder has a psychological problem that expresses itself in a physical form. In this essay I have discussed the biological, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral components of anxiety, mood/affective and dissociative/somatoform disorders. Anxiety and mood disorders could be harmful to an individual without proper help. With the technology and the education that we have, this could help individuals receive the proper diagnose and treatment. References: Anxiety Disorders received by Stacey Dixon on April 26, 2010 www.nimh.nih.gov › ... › Mental Health Topics Mood Disorders received by Stacey Dixon on April 25, 2010 mentalhealth.samhsa.gov/publications/allpubs/.../default.asp