A cause-and-effect relation between panic attacks and agoraphobia is an accepted concept. It is believed that, left unchecked, a subgroup of patients with panic attacks will consistently develop agoraphobia. However, to date, there are no means for early identification of this at-risk group. This study analyzed patients with panic attacks and phobic avoidance behaviors by using population-based...

Phobic responses are strong emotional reactions towards phobic objects, which can be described as a deficit in the automatic regulation of emotions. Difficulties in the voluntary cognitive control of these emotions suggest a further phobia-specific deficit in effortful emotion regulation mechanisms. The actual study is based on this emotion regulation conceptualization of specific phobias. The ...

The Ekbom syndrome, also known as delusion of parasitosis or acarophobia is an obsessive phobic state in which the patient thinks, imagines or believes that his or her skin is infested by parasites. In the hallucinatory state, he/she removes parts of the skin, identifying them as parasites. It can be primary or secondary to other organic or psychiatric diseases. Generally speaking these patient...

The present event-related potential (ERP) study investigated electrocortical changes related to cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) in spider phobic females. Forty-five patients and twenty non-phobic women were presented with phobia-relevant, generally fear-inducing, disgust-inducing and affectively neutral pictures in a first EEG session. Phobic patients were randomly assigned to either a therapy...

Little is known about the anxiety patients experience before attending for dental treatment. The aim of this study was to determine, in dentally phobic patients, the temporal relationship of pre-operative anxiety levels, and the disruption to daily life caused by this. Twenty-four phobic and 19 comparison (non-phobic) dental patients were recruited. Four validated questionnaires were used to as...

BACKGROUND Chronic psychological distress has been linked to shorter telomeres, an indication of accelerated aging. Yet, little is known about relations of anxiety to telomeres. We examined whether a typically chronic form of anxiety--phobic anxiety--is related to telomere length. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Relative telomere lengths (RTLs) in peripheral blood leukocytes were measured by q...

Psychotropic drugs and natural products can be useful for reducing the signs associated with phobic, panic or chronic anxiety and to improve trainability in situations where the pet is anxious, fearful, or aroused. Drugs may also have a dramatic effect when there is brain pathology, as with compulsive disorders, impulse dyscontrol or cognitive dysfunction syndrome. Drugs may also be useful for ...

Virtual reality can be used to provide phobic clients with therapeutic exposure to phobogenic stimuli. However, purpose-built therapeutic VR hardware and software can be expensive and difficult to adapt to individual client needs. In this study, inexpensive and readily adaptable PC computer games were used to provide exposure therapy to 13 phobic participants and 13 non-phobic control participa...

We investigated cortical responses and valence/arousal ratings of spider phobic, snake phobic, and healthy subjects while they were processing feared, fear-relevant, emotional neutral, and pleasant stimuli. Results revealed significantly larger amplitudes of late ERP components (P3 and late positive complex, LPC) but not of early components (N1, P2, N2) in phobics when subjects were processing ...