Abnormal Cognition: Stress, Emotion, Anxiety, and Depression

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering abnormal psychology concepts, including stress response systems, theories of emotion, anxiety disorders, PTSD neurobiology, and major depressive disorder memory mechanisms.

Stress

Environmental phenomena that require change; stress can be good or bad, where too little results in boredom and too much leads to feeling overwhelmed.

Stress Response

Neurological and endocrine physiological systems that allow the body to adapt to a changing environment, which can enable extreme physical feats or cause illness and physical wear.

HPA Axis

An endocrine stress response system comprising the Hypothalamus, Pituitary, and Adrenal Axis that releases stress hormones, specifically cortisol.

Amygdala (in Stress Response)

A nervous system structure that rapidly detects salient or important stimuli, activates the sympathetic nervous system to trigger epinephrine release, and stimulates the hypothalamus to initiate the HPA axis.

James-Lange Theory

An initial theory of emotion proposing that physiological arousal occurs first and directly precedes the conscious experience of an emotion.

Cognitive Appraisal

The cognitive evaluation of an environmental situation that, combined with physiological arousal, determines the specific emotion experienced.

Misattribution of Arousal

The psychological phenomenon where an individual misinterprets or incorrectly identifies the true cause of their physiological arousal.

Schachter and Singer (1962) Experiment

A study demonstrating misattribution of arousal in which participants uninformed or misinformed about adrenaline-induced physiological arousal adopted the emotion (euphoria or anger) of a confederate.

Anxiety Disorders

Disorders characterized by excessive and persistent fear, anxiety, and related behavioral disturbances, affecting $25\%$ to $30\%$ of individuals in their lifetime and frequently co-occurring with mood disorders.

Social Anxiety Disorder

An anxiety disorder featuring extreme, persistent fear and avoidance of social situations where one could potentially be scrutinized, humiliated, rejected, or display visible anxiety symptoms like blushing.

Specific Phobia

An anxiety disorder marked by excessive and persistent fear of a specific object, event, or situation that individuals go to great lengths to avoid, often treated using extinction and exposure therapy.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

A disorder stemming from an experienced or witnessed traumatic event, presenting with intrusive memories, hyperarousal, nightmares, an exaggerated startle response, and persistent negative affective states.

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (in PTSD)

A brain region normally responsible for emotion regulation and fear extinction that becomes hypoactive in individuals diagnosed with PTSD.

Hippocampus (in PTSD)

A brain structure that normally detects cortisol to down-regulate the HPA axis and supports context-dependent learning; its damage or smaller pre-trauma volume contributes to vulnerability and fear generalization.

Fear Generalization

The manifestation of fear responses in safe or non-threatening contexts due to impaired context-dependent learning and hippocampal damage.

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD)

A mood disorder characterized by persistent sadness, emptiness, hopelessness, and loss of interest in pleasurable activities, along with cognitive, sleep, metabolic, and motor disturbances.

Apathy

A dopamine-related cognitive symptom characterized by a significant reduction in motivation.

Anhedonia

A dopamine-related symptom characterized by a reduced ability to experience pleasure.

Pattern Separation (in Chronic Stress)

A basic memory process impaired by chronic stress-induced suppression of hippocampal neurogenesis, directly leading to reduced recollection in depression.

VTA/SN DA Neurons (in Chronic Stress)

Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra that are inhibited by chronic stress, producing weak reward responses and impaired encoding and consolidation of positive stimuli.

Sensitization of the Amygdala

A physiological consequence of chronic stress characterized by exaggerated amygdala responses, leading to enhanced retrieval of negative memories.