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How might a cognitive psychologist think about phobias and OCD? Could perceptual processes be different in people that

How might a cognitive psychologist think about phobias and OCD? Could perceptual processes be different in people that have anxiety disorders? How? Why?. Today’s session. The cognitive approach. Mind. World. Thinking. Perception. Information. Emotion. Behaviour. Behaviour.

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How might a cognitive psychologist think about phobias and OCD? Could perceptual processes be different in people that

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  1. How might a cognitive psychologist think about phobias and OCD? • Could perceptual processes be different in people that have anxiety disorders? How? Why?

  2. Today’s session

  3. The cognitive approach Mind World Thinking Perception Information Emotion Behaviour Behaviour

  4. The cognitive approach • People with anxiety disorders feel anxious because they perceive and understand the world in threatening ways. • Which sorts of perceptual process might be involved? • How might the biases in people’s thinking play a part?

  5. Cognition and anxiety • ‘Catastrophic’ thinking (CT) • Maladaptive attempts to control CT • Phobia – avoidance, lack of reality testing • OCD – paradoxical effects of suppression • Tendency to misconstrue world and own responses to it

  6. In pairs... • Design a study to test the idea that people with an anxiety disorder think differently from those that don’t. • You will need to think about... • Variables & operationalisation • An alternative hypothesis • A sample • Controls

  7. Now swap designs with a different pair... • Can you identify any flaws in the other pair’s design? • Will the study allow you to decide whether anxiety patients really do think differently from others? • Have appropriate variables been operationalised and controlled? • Is there anything that might show a false effect or hide a real one?

  8. In pairs... • Make at least one improvement to the design of your study.

  9. One possible approach... • We might expect that compared with non-phobics, phobics would be more likely to interpret ambiguous stimuli as threatening • Spider or flower? (Kolassa et al, 2007)

  10. What would be the problems with... • Trying to alter how people think to see if you can make them phobic? • Comparing phobics and non-phobics on any measure of cognition?

  11. Homework pt. 2 • Read, understand & take notes: • Cognitive explanations of anxiety (Pennington & McLoughlin, 2008; pp. 294-295; 307-308 • Kolassa et al (2007) – link on VLE. It’s the original paper so you’ll need to work at it. Pull out AMRC

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