Predicting doom and Gloom..."Uncertainty and Anticipation in Anxiety"

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Fun CH
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Predicting doom and Gloom..."Uncertainty and Anticipation in Anxiety"

Post by Fun CH »

dorankj wrote: Sat Dec 18, 2021 1:26 pm You are not predicting a civil war, you’re trying to CAUSE it!
Just be aware, if you're not already, that people who predict doom and gloom may just be experiencing, and therefore expressing, anxiety.

What do you do as a first responder when you encounter someone who's having an anxiety attack?

Here is a good article (just a quote) on that issue as it applies to Human psychology.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4276319/

"Abstract
Uncertainty about a possible future threat disrupts our ability to avoid it or to mitigate its negative impact, and thus results in anxiety. Here, we focus the broad literature on the neurobiology of anxiety through the lens of uncertainty. We identify five processes essential for adaptive anticipatory responses to future threat uncertainty, and propose that alterations to the neural instantiation of these processes results in maladaptive responses to uncertainty in pathological anxiety. This framework has the potential to advance the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of clinical anxiety.

The human brain, it has been written, is an “anticipation machine, and ‘making future’ is the most important thing it does”1. The ability to use past experiences and information about our current state and environment to predict the future allows us to increase the odds of desired outcomes, while avoiding or bracing ourselves for future adversity. This ability is directly related to our level of certainty regarding future events – how likely they are, when they will occur, and what they will be like. Uncertainty diminishes how efficiently and effectively we can prepare for the future, and thus contributes to anxiety.

Although this relationship between uncertainty about future negative events and anxiety makes intuitive sense, there has been a disconnect between this conceptualization of anxiety and most neuroimaging investigations of clinical anxiety disorders. The predominant focus of this research has been on heightened emotional reactivity to aversive events; however, the tasks commonly used in this research might not fully engage the psychological processes that are at the heart of anxious pathology – that is, the anticipatory cognitive, affective, and behavioral processes executed to avoid or reduce the impact of a potential threat. These anticipatory processes serve an adaptive function when executed at a level commensurate with the likelihood and severity of threat, but can be maladaptive when conducted excessively2. Comprehensive information about the probability, timing, and nature of a future negative event promotes more efficient allocation of these resources, but such information is rarely available owing to the inherent uncertainty of the future."
What's so funny 'bout peace love and understanding--Nick Lowe
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