Avoidant personality disorder (APD) ís considered to be an active-detached personality pattern, meaning that avoidants purposefully avoid people due to fears of humiliation & rejection. It ís thought to be a pathological syndromal extension of the “normal inhibited” personality, which ís characterized by a watchful behavioral appearance, shy interpersonal conduct, a preoccupied cognitive style, uneasy affective expression & a lonely self-perception (Millon & Everly). According to this view, the avoidant pattern seems to range ín varying degrees along a symptomological continuum from mild to extreme. In mild cases, a person may be said to be normally shy, whereas extreme cases indicate personality disorder.
It should be noted that many more people have avoidant styles as opposed to...
Strohschein compared children whose parents remained together and those whose parents had divorced between 1994 and 1998. The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth of Canada continues to interview the sample of 17,000 children once in two years. Antisocial behavior along with anxiety and depression is quite common among children whose parents are about to break up. The parents who are about to get divorced also reported higher levels of depression and family dysfunction, which also has...
LONDON: Men who want to carve up the dancefloor should take a good look at their bodies before launching into a waltz or foxtrot in the hope of impressing a woman.
Scientists have discovered that the best male dancers tend to have more symmetrical body features, in a study that suggests dancing ability may be sexually appealing because it conveys useful information about a man's physical fitness.
Many species, including humans, are known to prefer mates with...
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Julia Trachy always counted herself among the happy. So after she dropped 25 pounds in two and a half weeks and her stomach hurt so much she couldn't hold herself up to play the violin, she didn't read it as depression.
"I just thought there was something wrong with me physically," said Trachy, a sophomore nursing student at the University of Minnesota. When her doctor suggested therapy, she thought, "They think I'm making this up. I was really hurt just because all my life I was the fun person."
Student mental health is a rising concern at universities across the country _ 86 percent of campus counseling centers report say they've seen an increase in...
The holiday season is a time full of joy, cheer, parties, and family gatherings. However, for many people, it is a time of self-evaluation, loneliness, reflection on past failures, and anxiety about an uncertain future.
Many factors can cause the “holiday blues”: stress, fatigue, unrealistic expectations, over-commercialization, financial constraints, and the inability to be with one’s family and friends. The demands of shopping, parties, family reunions, and house guests also contribute to feelings of tension. People who do not become depressed may...
The FDA and drug company GlaxoSmithKline have strengthened their warning about using the antidepressant drug Paxil during early pregnancy.
The warning is based on early results from two studies. The studies showed a higher rate of heart-related birth defects in babies born to women who took Paxil during early pregnancy than in babies of women in the general population or women who took other antidepressants.
Hypnosis, with its long and checkered history in medicine and entertainment, is receiving some new respect from neuroscientists. Recent brain studies of people who are susceptible to suggestion indicate that when they act on the suggestions their brains show profound changes in how they process information. The suggestions, researchers report, literally change what people see, hear, feel and believe to be true.The new experiments, which used brain imaging, found that people who were hypnotized "saw" colors where there were none. Others lost the ability to make simple decisions. Some people looked at common English words and thought that they were gibberish."
The idea that perceptions can be manipulated by expectations" is fundamental to the study of cognition, said Michael I. Posner, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of Oregon and expert on attention. "But now we're really getting at the mechanisms."Even with little understanding of how it works, hypnosis has...
Why is fear so intractable? And what can we do about it? Therapy has provided succor for many people; others have relied on the strength they get from their faith or other support networks. But in a world where we regularly witness hair-raising events--such as the aftermath of suicide bomber attacks in full color on our living-room televisions, on Web sites and on newspapers' front pages--is such verbal support enough? Answering a perceived need, fear-blunting medications are coming onto the scene. Could we--should we--all simply pop pills to ease our anxieties?
Fear is more than a state of mind; it is chemical. The feeling of alarm arises from...
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new study has found no major differences in how people of different ethnic groups respond to the anti-anxiety drug paroxetine, sold as Paxil.
Studies have documented worse quality mental health care for minorities, and minorities are rarely included in studies of drug treatment for psychiatric disorders, Dr. Peter P. Roy-Byrne of the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and colleagues note. The percentage of people with certain genetic variations involved in metabolizing drugs varies by ethnic group, they add.
"Although these differences produce only 'average' variations in kinetics and dynamics, the dissimilarities could contribute to therapeutic or side effect profiles that vary from the norm," the researchers note in their report in the October issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
To determine if there were ethnic variations in...