Abnormal Psychology - Lab Report Example

They can be intrusive thoughts or can be experienced as distressing impulses. The second manifestation consists of physical tension. Muscles tense in a state of readiness, whether there is an actual threat or not. If the muscles involved in the tensing action are not relieved, the tension can become chronic, creating a necessity for some sort of intervention to calm the body. The third type of symptom are physical symptoms which can range from heart palpitations and nausea to sweating and fainting.

The fourth set of effects can be identified as disassociative anxiety which can be seen through symptoms of depresonalization, derealization, out-of-body experiences, hallucinations, waves of dark mood patterns, episodes of numbness, and amnesia (Healy, 2009, p. 136-137). There are a great number of anxiety disorders that range in effect from long term to short term. These disorders can include, but are not limited to: stage fright, neurotic anxiety, phobic neurosis, panic disorder, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hysterical or disassociate disorders, hypochondriasis, and a generalized anxiety disorder which has individuated manifestations (Healy, 2009).

Large scale events that happen at a public level can cause people who were not directly involved in the incidents to have anxiety problems after the occurrences of those events. Events such as terrorists attacks can cause individual to have a sense of a lack of safety, the concept manifesting in post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTST, as the individual tries to process the change in the way in which they perceive their world. According to a study done in the United States five months after the events of the World Trade Towers being destroyed on 11 September, 2001 with a surveyed group of 2,126 people, 17% of those people who were outside of New York were in