RETRIEVAL PRACTICE Take a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within this section). Then click the 'show answer' button to check your answers. Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term retention (McDaniel et al., 2009).

Anxious feelings and behaviors are classified as an anxiety disorder only when they form a pattern of distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety. People with generalized anxiety disorder feel persistently and uncontrollably tense and apprehensive, for no apparent reason. In the more extreme panic disorder, anxiety escalates into periodic episodes of intense dread. Those with a phobia may be irrationally afraid of a specific object, activity, or situation. Two other disorders (OCD and PTSD) involve anxiety but are classified separately from the anxiety disorders.

Persistent and repetitive thoughts (obsessions), actions (compulsions), or both characterize obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

Symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) include four or more weeks of haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or sleep problems following some traumatic experience.

The learning perspective views anxiety disorders, OCD, and PTSD as products of fear conditioning, stimulus generalization, fearful behavior reinforcement, and observational learning of others’ fears and cognitions (interpretations, irrational beliefs, and hypervigilance). The biological perspective considers the role that fears of life-threatening animals, objects, or situations played in natural selection and evolution; genetic predispositions for high levels of emotional reactivity and neurotransmitter production; and abnormal responses in the brain’s fear circuits.