This study investigated whether fear expectancy in phobic individuals induces priming of the defensive system, thus generating a "blind" phobic response even to non-phobic stimuli. We employed a paradigm in which two different visual cues signalled the upcoming picture presentation of either a spider or an innocuous animal (congruent condition). Unknown to the participants, the visual cue was i...

Investigations of fear conditioning in rodents and humans have illuminated the neural mechanisms underlying cued and contextual fear. A critical question is how personality dimensions such as trait anxiety act through these mechanisms to confer vulnerability to anxiety disorders, and whether humans' ability to overcome acquired fears depends on regulatory skills not characterized in animal mode...

Knowledge about children’s fears and the clinical phenomenology of anxiety disorders has increased dramatically over the past three decades following the expansion of the anxiety and phobic disorders categories in the DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) and the development of the Fear Survey Schedule for Children-Revised (FSSC-R; Ollendick, 1983). The FSSC-R, the most frequently us...

Attentional biases to threat are considered central to anxiety disorders, however physiological evidence of their nature and time course is lacking. Event-related potentials (ERPs) characterized sensory and cognitive changes while 20 outpatients with panic disorder (PD), 20 with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and 20 healthy controls (HCs) responded to the color (emotional Stroop task) or ...

objective: premenstrual syndrome (pms) is a common disorder with prevalence rate of approximately 30%; its concurrence with psychiatric symptoms will make it a disabling condition that resists usual treatment. objective: this study was enrolled to assess the co-morbidity of pms and psychiatric disorders in a sample of girls with pms compared to those without pms. material and method : this stud...

BACKGROUND Patients suffering from dizziness due to vertigo are commonly encountered in the department of otolaryngology. If various clinical examinations do not reveal any objective findings, then the patients are referred to the department of internal medicine or psychiatry. In many cases, the diagnosis is psychological dizziness. Phobic postural vertigo, which was first reported by Brandt T ...

A diet low in fat and rich in fibre has been recommended to optimize general health and in particular cardiovascular health. Health attitudes to fat and fibre were studied in relation to food and nutrient intake and sociocultural and lifestyle factors amongst the general population of Northern Ireland. The study population comprised 592 adults aged 16-64 years; health attitudes to fat and fibre...