Table of Contents
Why this article?
I choose this article because it is something I can relate to. I struggle with social anxiety. Not by choice but by the make up of who I am. Before selecting this topic, I battled with choosing this topic or not because I try to ignore my problem and shove it down deep. So my curiosity drew me to dig deep, which resulted for me to study this topic. I wanted to know if it was really the nature of who I am and is it truly something that I struggle with.
What is anxiety?
Dictionary.com states that anxiety is a “feeling of worry or nervousness typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” Once a person is displaying characteristics of anxiety symptoms may include sweating, faster heartbeat, not being able to process things at a normal pace and so much more. So how can their be different types of anxieties? Isn’t anxiety the same across the board? Well to answer that question, all types of anxiety are essentially the same. Yes, but what makes the difference is the triggers, and the setting / place of when it takes off. Which can range from social settings to heights or maybe even water anxiety. The ques to anxiety are the fear and avoidance of the “anxiety attack”. People who suffer with anxiety condition themselves to be in such a state.
Hypothesis
The hypothesis leads to the thought that the cause is called amygdalar dysfunction which is common to a variety of different anxiety disorders. The article states that amygdalar dysfunction is when “our nuclei in the brain towards the base creates an emotional responsiveness to our surroundings. While it also creates a sense of danger.” In other words our amydalar gets over stimulated which causes a sense of anxiety in certain conditions. Which for some is dependent on setting and who may be around causing them to overreact, sweat, increase in heartbeat, uncomfortability and even to slur your words.
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Methods: Subjects, Procedures, and Measurements
Paragraph one described the stages of emotional withdraws of the tested patients. For guidances they referred to methods which were references from PubMed and study volunteers of ptsd, social anxiety, specific phobias, and ocd. They used a type of study called fear-conditioning which then compared brain responses of subjects to their conditioned stimulus then compared it with their reactions to their non-conditioned stimulus. Within their studies of social anxiety they used ninety-three subjects that presented themselves with social anxiety which then they compared them against seventy-three subjects without social anxiety. In order to study their data they used an FMRI to see brain activity, facial expression, bodily movements, and speech. An FMRI is a “Functional magnetic resonance imaging system which is a technique for measuring and mapping brain activity which is noninvasive and safe to all subjects” (What is).
Results
After the studies concluded the results proved that patients with the social anxiety disorders, showed an increase of hyperactivity within the brain. Which the hyperactivity consisted of the following symptoms: aggression, fidgeting, impulsivity,absent-mindness, problem paying attention, forgetfulness, anger, mood swings and may contain depression or learning disabilities. So patients that are all diagnosed with social anxiety disorder all present this symptoms during times of distress.
Other studies
The National Institute of Mental Health did a study to see if behavioral inhibition would have an affect on a person creating social anxiety disorder. They did a total of seven studies which proved that those types of settings would increase the chance of developing a form of social anxiety.
Another study by K. Luan Phan, M.D., proved that “the activation of the amygdalas responses to happy, harsh angry, disgusted, and fearful faces were greater in patients who suffer from anxiety based disorders. The extent of amygdala activation was positively correlated with severity of social anxiety symptoms, but not general state or trait anxiety levels.”
An article written by Joseph Biederman, M.D. and other doctors, studied whether or not these psychological disorders are dispersed down to their offspring. Parents with these disorders were significantly more likely pass down psychological disorders to their children who presented to have behavior disorders and also had higher scores on the attention problems scale.
Conclusion
In conclusion, studies show that there is a recurrent effect within the brain from social settings / fears. Different things set it off which makes people display abnormal behavior. These behaviors that people display aren’t random behaviors but they are also not their regular person when they are in their social anxiety stages.
References
- “Association between Amygdala Hyperactivity to Harsh Faces and Severity of Social Anxiety in Generalized Social Phobia.” NeuroImage, Academic Press, 26 Oct. 2005,
- “Behavioral Inhibition and Risk for Developing Social Anxiety Disorder: A Meta-Analytic Study.” NeuroImage, Academic Press, 12 Sept. 2012,
- “Dictionary.com.” Dictionary.com, Dictionary.com, www.dictionary.com/.
- K. Luan Phan, M.D., Department of Psychiatry, The University of Chicago
- “What Is FMRI?” What Is FMRI? – Center for Functional MRI – UC San Diego, fmri.ucsd.edu/Research/whatisfmri.html.
