What Makes People Anxious Or Fearful - 1168 Words

What makes people anxious or fearful? I personally have strong test anxiety; this anxiety seems to always be there no matter how much I study for an exam. Once the exams are passed out and it is time for me to take the exam, I cannot remember anything and feel I am going to fail the exam. I constantly ask myself, where did I get this test anxiety from? I’ve also always been afraid of what others will think of me if I do not do as well as them on the exam. Does my test anxiety and fear of what people think of me, correlate? After reading this week’s chapter and attending lecture, I decided to look up different articles about classical conditioning. I found an article about anxiety in relation to classic conditioning. This sparked my†¦show more content†¦The first type of anxiety is objective anxiety; this is idea of physiological and cognitive consequences of genuine future danger. â€Å"The fining characteristic of objective anxiety, also called â€Å"fearâ⠂¬ , is the presence of an obvious eliciting cause for the anxiety† (Kimmel, Brennan, pg. 371,1981). The second type of anxiety is neurotic, which is caused by society’s punishment or threat of punishment by not being accepted by society. Behavioristic treatments took place using classically conditioned fear through Mowrer’s theory research. Freud viewed anxiety as learned, whereas Mowrer viewed learning as learning meant conditioning. According to the author, â€Å"the classically-conditioned-fear model of anxiety and neurosis has remained popular among behaviorists (e.g. Eysenck 1979), in spite of the fact that it appears quite clearly to implicate specific, brief conditioned stimuli, rather than unknown or repressed stimuli, and the anxiety it conceptualizes is a relatively brief emotional reaction rather than a continuing, or floating state† (Kimmel, Brennan, pg. 372, 1981). Typically in order to carry out an experiment for classic conditioning a la b is required and it takes minutes, hours or days for the experiment. As the years have progressed their has been a variety of stimuli’s that are already conditioned, which increases the internal stimulus that will be identical to one already conditioned.