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Anxiety Study Psychology

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Anxiety is a category of psychological and physiological responses to stress inducing events. Anxious reactions to threatening situations are natural and should be expected throughout a person’s lifetime. Anxiety disorders are classified as a perpetuation of anxiousness, when that fear and uncertainty of future events is remains constant despite the absence of the stressful stimulus and leads to hindering negative emotional states (Evans et al., 2005). Anxiety disorders fall under a broader category of Internalizing Disorders (ID). ID includes conditions of anxiety and depression, the etiology of which is not well understood. The Juvenile Anxiety Study (JAS) is IRB-approved and NIMH grant-funded. JAS and its partner study, Adolescent and Young …show more content…

Some of the parameters that will be measured are hypersensitivity to carbon dioxide and the participant’s response to stress. During my time working for the study, I will be scoring the physiological files generated during the task measuring CO2 hypersensitivity. An indicator that we use to measure a participant’s hypersensitivity is EKG and part of what I will be doing specifically is determining the heart rate variability throughout the different CO2 levels experienced by the participant. It’s expected that the participants that exhibit signs of depressive or anxiety disorders will have lower heart rate variability, which puts them at risk for a cardiovascular episode that could potentially be fatal (Gorman and Sloan, 2000). The other aspect of the CO2 task is the hypersensitivity and the participant response to air that has a higher CO2 concentration, mimicking the effects of hyperventilation. Hyperventilation is common in panic disorder, classified as an anxiety disorder in the DSM V. Some people with panic disorder have a minute abnormality in their respiratory system and their disposition to the disorder may be due to an unstable autonomic nervous system (Papp et …show more content…

My involvement began during the fall semester of 2014 and will continue until the end of Spring 2015.

Literature Cited

Evans, D., Foa, E., Gur, R., Hendin, H., O'Brien, C., Seligman, M., & Walsh, B. (Eds.). (2005). Treating and preventing adolescent mental health disorders : What we know and what we don't know : A research agenda for improving the mental health of our youth. Oxford Medicine.

Jack M. Gorman, Richard P. Sloan, Heart rate variability in depressive and anxiety disorders, American Heart Journal, Volume 140, Issue 4, Supplement, October 2000, Pages S77-S83, ISSN 0002-8703,

Papp, L.A., Klein, D.F., & Gorman, J.M. (1993). Carbon dioxide hypersensitivity, hyperventilation, and panic disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 150(8),

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