No description available.

<p>The aim of this research study was to examine the clinical, behavioural and neurobiological characteristics of children who are considered to be at increased risk for developing anxiety disorders. The study population included high-risk children who have at least one parent with social phobia and normal-risk control subjects. The first objective of the study was to examine the prevalence of anxiety disorders in high-risk children. We determined the proportion of high-risk children who met criteria for a psychiatric disorder using structured clinical interviews and assessed symptom severity using measures of anxiety and depression. We found the prevalence of anxiety disorders to be elevated in high-risk children with 77% meeting criteria for a lifetime psychiatric disorder. High-risk subjects also had significantly higher levels of anxiety symptoms relative to normal-risk subjects. The second objective of the study was to examine threat-related attention processing in high-risk and normal-risk children using the dot-probe attention orienting task. We compared probe detection reaction times of high-risk children and normal-risk control children when they were exposed to emotional facial stimuli. We did not find any significant within-group or between-group differences in reaction times in our high-risk and normal-risk subjects. However, we did observe a trend towards longer reaction times in high-risk subjects for all trial types relative to normal-risk subjects, which could indicate general processing deficits in the high-risk group. The third objective of this study was to examine the activity of emotion processing brain regions using functional magnetic resonance imaging (<em>f</em>MRI) in children who are at increased risk for developing anxiety disorders. We compared the blood oxygenation level dependant (BOLD) response while high-risk and normal-risk subjects were engaged in the dot probe attention orienting task. Using <em>f</em>MRI, the BOLD response was measured while subjects were exposed to masked emotional (angry, happy or neutral) facial stimuli. We found increased activation of several frontal, temporal and limbic regions in high-risk subjects relative to normal-risk subjects during the presentation of emotional facial stimuli. These regions included the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, hippocampus, insula, basal ganglia and temporal regions. To our knowledge this is the first study to characterize a sample of children at-risk for anxiety disorders using clinical, behavioural and neuroimaging data. The findings from this study demonstrate that high-risk children experience heightened anxiety symptoms and that they also present with functional abnormalities of brain regions involved in emotion processing. These results highlight the need for early identification and intervention for children at-risk for anxiety disorders. Future studies should aim for longitudinal study designs combined with neuroimaging techniques to examine changes in anxiety symptoms over time and to study the effects of treatment on the function of limbic and prefrontal structures in children at-risk for anxiety disorders.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Objective: This study examined (a) the distribution of physical symptoms in youth with specific primary anxiety disorders (i.e. separation anxiety disorder [SAD], generalized anxiety disorder [GAD], and social phobia [SP]) and (b) their response to treatment with cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT; 14 sessions of CBT over the course of 12 weeks), medication, combination therapy (CBT + medication), or pill placebo in a sample. Method: Anxiety disordered youth (N = 488, age 7-17) who met criteria for a primary diagnosis of GAD, SAD, and/or SP as part of the Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Study (CAMS; Walkup et al. 2008) were included in this study. The sample was diverse and included children with comorbid secondary diagnoses. Results: The most common somatic complaints were headache, stomach pain or aches, feeling drowsy or too sleepy, head cold or sniffles, and sleeplessness. The distribution of these complaints did not differ across diagnostic groups. The number and severity of physical symptoms decreased over the course of treatment. Treatment condition, including placebo, was unrelated to the number and severity of physical symptoms posttreatment. Conclusions: Treatment of anxiety leads to a decrease in the number and severity of physical symptoms experienced in anxiety-disordered youth, irrespective of treatment type. / Psychology

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to (a) identify educational counseling interventions and accommodations that learning disabled (LD) postsecondary students received that contributed to their academic success and (b) identify barriers and issues that LD students experienced in accessing services. Ten postsecondary students were identified and classified as LD that had attended a community college in Northern Virginia and volunteered to participate in this study. Out of the ten, two students were selected for this research study. These students were interviewed using a two-part questionnaire (Appendix C). The questionnaire included significant factors and variables frequently associated with postsecondary success. Questions in part I of the Questionnaire pertained to the LD student's profile (e.g., medical and social history, employment, volunteer work, hobbies, education including special education experiences, language therapy, and assessments). Questions in part II consisted of the recommended support services identified in the literature (e.g., disability awareness, accommodations, self-advocacy skills, academic remediation, parent and counselor advocacy, computer technology, career counseling, transition services, and rehabilitation counseling) often delivered to LD students. Psychological and educational assessments were also obtained, reviewed, and coded. The interviews were tape recorded in order to assure concise descriptive information from the student's own "personal" past and current educational experiences. Each student reported that they had received a great deal of assistance by another individual who had been most instrumental in helping them over come their postsecondary academic barriers. These individuals were also interviewed. The interviews were transcribed, and the data collected were coded. Two in-depth comprehensive case studies were developed by reviewing and recording data from the interviews, psychological assessments, and educational records. All narrative material was subsequently analyzed by coding procedures used in grounded theory. / Ed. D.

Research into transdiagnostic processes underlying clinical disorders has indicated the importance of avoidance motivation and mixed approach-avoidance motivation, as well as negativity bias in the development and maintenance of depression and anxiety. The primary aim of this project is to investigate the relationship between avoidance/mixed approach-avoidance motivation and negativity bias among individuals with and without symptoms of depression and anxiety. 408 participants collected via MTurk were assigned to one of three experimental conditions in which a) avoidance motivation activation b) mixed approach-avoidance motivation activation, or a control task was completed. Results indicate the trait avoidance motivation is associated with negativity bias in interpretation of ambiguous information. This relationship is moderated by symptoms of depression, so that at high levels of depression, increases in trait avoidance have their largest effect, leading to more negativity bias in interpretation. Compared to the control condition which did not undergo motivation manipulation, assignment to the avoidance motivation condition did not have a main effect leading to higher levels of negativity bias. Assignment to the avoidance motivation condition did have an interaction effect with anxiety symptoms, so that when participants were assigned to the avoidance condition (compared to the control condition), higher levels of anxiety led to greater negativity bias. When mixed approach-avoidance motivation was activated, there were no significant main effects (compared to a control condition) on negativity bias, and this relationship was not significantly moderated by levels of depression or anxiety.

My thesis aims at identifying both genetic and environmental causes of major depressive disorder (MDD), using a large case-control study: 6,000 Chinese women with recurrent MDD and 6,000 controls. One of the major challenges for conducting genetic research on MDD is disease heterogeneity. The first question addressed is how different MDD is from highly comorbid anxiety disorders. I examine how anxiety disorders predict clinical features of depression and the degree of heterogeneity in their predictive pattern. The second question addressed is whether clinically defined MDD is a single disorder, or whether it consists of multiple subtypes. Results are then compared with and interpreted in the context of Western studies. Furthermore, latent class analysis and factor analysis results are also used in association analysis to explore more genetically homogeneous subtypes. Genetic data were derived using a novel strategy, low pass whole genome sequence analysis. Using genotypes imputed from the sequence data, I show that a cluster of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is significantly associated with a binary disease phenotype including only cases with = 4 episodes of MDD, suggesting that recurrence might be an indication of genetic predisposition. The third issue examined is the contribution of rare variants to disease susceptibility. Again using sparse sequence data, I identified exonic sequence variants and performed gene-based analysis by comparing the number of variants between cases and controls in every gene. Furthermore I performed gene enrichment test by combining P values of SNP association tests at different minor allele frequency ranges. Overall, I did not find convincing evidence that rare variants aggregately contribute to disease susceptibility. However, the gene-based analysis resulted in an unexpected finding: cases have an excess of variants in all thirteen-protein coding mitochondrial genes, which was due to copy number differences in the mitochondrial genome. Both human phenotypic data as well as mice experimental data show that the increase in the mitochondrial copy number in cases is due to chronic stress.

This double-blind placebo-controlled study investigated the relative efficacy of Homoeopathic similimum treatment as compared to psychological counselling (Cognitive therapy combined with Behavioural therapy), in the management of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD). / Thesis (M.Tech.: Homoeopathy)-Dept. of Homoeopathy, Durban Institute of Technology, 2006 xli, 201 leaves

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

The thesis focuses on the issue of self-esteem in clients diagnosed with anxiety disorders. While this condition belongs to the most common mental illnesses, the role of the patient's self-esteem has not been sufficiently researched. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of the relation between anxiety and self-esteem, and to examine whether clients with so called Other Anxiety Disorder manifest specific differences in their level of self-esteem. In the theoretical part we summarize the key findings in the domain of anxiety disorder research; we further compare the different psychological approaches to the issue of self-esteem. There is a particular focus on authors who explore the possible causes and features of self-esteem deviations in patients with anxiety disorders, and who propose hypotheses regarding the nature and origins of this linkage. The empirical part of the thesis focuses on the analysis of the explicit and implicit self-esteem level in clients with anxiety disorder. For the purpose of measuring explicit self-esteem we have used foreign questionnaires, namely the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and the SLSC-R. For implicit self-esteem evaluation we have used the Rorschach test. The research outcomes indicate that clients with anxiety disorders display...