Anxiety Disorders

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In industrialized countries, anxiety disorders are the largest group of mental disorders for which patients are referred, and without appropriate treatment the natural course is often chronic. Luckily, anxiety disorders are relatively well studied and understood, and the outcome of treatment is relatively favorable.

In anxiety disorders, it is fascinating that a person can get a panic attack by, for instance, seeing a spider even though spiders are completely harmless. It gets even more interesting when you start to disentangling such an anxiety response. If we do that, we can even empathize with this over-the-top panic response and it becomes very understandable why this response does not fade out. For instance, one reason is that the panic response itself blocks the ability to discover that a spider is actually a harmless creature that does not run toward to bite you. There are many more reasons that maintain anxiety responses.

In this course, students will first learn what the features of pathological anxiety are and are challenged to apply findings in the literature on to clinical cases. For instance, why do patients with social anxiety disorder, patients that are highly afraid of being disliked actually provoke dislike in others? The literature focuses on cognitive-behavioral maintenance factors of the anxiety disorders such as cognitive biases, safety behaviors, metacognitive processes and imagery. With regard to treatment techniques knowlegde will be updated with recent insights of the working mechanisms of exposure and developments in new treatment techniques such as EMDR, imagery rescripting and cognitive bias modification (CBM). At the end of the course, they will scientifically debate about new treatment developments in the anxiety disorder field. Last, students get the opportunity to design experimental studies that disentangle maintenance factors in anxiety. They will design such studies in subgroups and present them. The final aim and most important assignment of this course is that students write their own research proposal on one of the topics in the course.