Search results for "Anxiety."
showing 10 items of 1599 documents
Psychological interventions to foster resilience in healthcare students
2020
Background Resilience can be defined as maintaining or regaining mental health during or after significant adversities such as a potentially traumatising event, challenging life circumstances, a critical life transition or physical illness. Healthcare students, such as medical, nursing, psychology and social work students, are exposed to various study- and work-related stressors, the latter particularly during later phases of health professional education. They are at increased risk of developing symptoms of burnout or mental disorders. This population may benefit from resilience-promoting training programmes. Objectives To assess the effects of interventions to foster resilience in healthc…
Night-Time Shift Work and Related Stress Responses: A Study on Security Guards
2020
Work-related stress can induce a break in homeostasis by placing demands on the body that are met by the activation of two different systems, the hypothalamic&ndash
Mental load during cognitive performance in complex regional pain syndrome I.
2018
Background Complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) is associated with deficits in limb recognition. The purpose of our study was to determine whether mental load during this task affected performance, sympathetic nervous system activity or pain in CRPS patients. Methods We investigated twenty CRPS‐I patients with pain in the upper extremity and twenty age‐ and sex‐matched healthy controls. Each participant completed a limb recognition task. To experimentally manipulate mental load, the presentation time for each picture varied from 2 s (greatest mental load), 4, 6 to 10 s (least mental load). Before and after each run, pain intensity was assessed. Skin conductance was recorded continuously. R…
Neural Mechanisms of Placebo Anxiolysis
2015
The beneficial effects of placebo treatments on fear and anxiety (placebo anxiolysis) are well known from clinical practice, and there is strong evidence indicating a contribution of treatment expectations to the efficacy of anxiolytic drugs. Although clinically highly relevant, the neural mechanisms underlying placebo anxiolysis are poorly understood. In two studies in humans, we tested whether the administration of an inactive treatment along with verbal suggestions of anxiolysis can attenuate experimentally induced states of phasic fear and/or sustained anxiety. Phasic fear is the response to a well defined threat and includes attentional focusing on the source of threat and concomitant …
Single dose of l-dopa makes extinction memories context-independent and prevents the return of fear
2013
Traumatic events can engender persistent excessive fear responses to trauma reminders that may return even after successful treatment. Extinction, the laboratory analog of behavior therapy, does not erase conditioned fear memories but generates competing, fear-inhibitory "extinction memories" that, however, are tied to the context in which extinction occurred. Accordingly, a dominance of fear over extinction memory expression--and, thus, return of fear--is often observed if extinguished fear stimuli are encountered outside the extinction (therapy) context. We show that postextinction administration of the dopamine precursor L-dopa makes extinction memories context-independent, thus strongly…
The effects of social pressure and emotional expression on the cone of gaze in patients with social anxiety disorder
2016
Abstract Background and objectives Patients with social anxiety disorder suffer from pronounced fears in social situations. As gaze perception is crucial in these situations, we examined which factors influence the range of gaze directions where mutual gaze is experienced (the cone of gaze). Methods The social stimulus was modified by changing the number of people (heads) present and the emotional expression of their faces. Participants completed a psychophysical task, in which they had to adjust the eyes of a virtual head to gaze at the edge of the range where mutual eye-contact was experienced. Results The number of heads affected the width of the gaze cone: the more heads, the wider the …
Who is looking at me? The cone of gaze widens in social phobia
2011
Gaze direction is an important cue that regulates social interactions and facilitates joint attention. Although humans are very accurate in determining gaze directions in general, they have a surprisingly liberal criterion for the presence of mutual gaze. Using an established psychophysical task that required observers to adjust the eyes of a virtual head to the margins of the area of mutual gaze, we examined whether the resulting cone of gaze is altered in people with social phobia. It turned out that during presence of a second virtual person, the gaze cone's width was specifically enlarged in patients with social phobia as compared to healthy controls. The size of this effect was correla…
Health anxiety, cyberchondria, and coping in the current COVID-19 pandemic: Which factors are related to coronavirus anxiety?
2020
Highlights • First study on anxiety and cyberchondria during the COVID-19 pandemic. • The increase in virus anxiety was particularly strong with elevated health anxiety. • Health anxiety, cyberchondria, and virus anxiety are positively associated. • Combined health anxiety and cyberchondria is associated with strong virus anxiety. • Being informed and adaptive emotion regulation can have a beneficial effect.
No effects of psychosocial stress on memory retrieval in non-treated young students with Generalized Social Phobia.
2015
Generalized Social Phobia (GSP) is a common anxiety disorder that produces clear social life disruptions. There is no consensus on the specific processes involved in its development, but the role of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has been suggested. This study analyzed the effects of the cortisol response to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) on the memory retrieval of pictures with different emotional valences in 45 non-treated young students with GSP and 50 non-anxious (NA) subjects (mean=19.35years, SD=0.18). No differences were found in the cortisol response of GSP and NA subjects to the TSST and control sessions. In addition, psychosocial stress impaired memory retrieva…
Enhancing the efficacy of integrative improvisational music therapy in the treatment of depression : study protocol for a randomised controlled trial
2019
Abstract Background Depression is among the leading causes of disability worldwide. Not all people with depression respond adequately to standard treatments. An innovative therapy that has shown promising results in controlled trials is music therapy. Based on a previous trial that suggested beneficial effects of integrative improvisational music therapy (IIMT) on short and medium-term depression symptoms as well as anxiety and functioning, this trial aims to determine potential mechanisms of and improvements in its effects by examining specific variations of IIMT. Methods/design A 2 × 2 factorial randomised controlled trial will be carried out at a single centre in Finland involving 68 adu…