Prevalence and correlates of dental anxiety in patients seeking dental care.

Objectives: To examine the prevalence of dental anxiety and its associations with pain and other psychological variables among patients seeking dental treatment and develop a directed acyclical graph of these relationships.

Methods: One hundred and twenty patients who sought regular or emergency dental care completed a semi-structured interview assessing DSM-IV specific phobia of dental procedures and questionnaires assessing dental anxiety, pain at last dental visit, blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia, social appearance anxiety, and other psychological constructs. Differences between regular and emergency patients were explored using t-tests.

Clinical implications of panic symptoms in dental phobia.

The occurrence of panic symptoms in various anxiety disorders has been associated with more severely impaired and difficult-to-treat cases, but this has not been investigated in dental phobia. We examined the clinical implications of panic symptoms related to sub-clinical and clinically significant dental phobia. The sample consisted of 61 patients at a university dental clinic who endorsed symptoms of dental phobia, 25 of whom met criteria for a formal diagnosis of dental phobia.

De novo fear conditioning across diagnostic groups in the affective disorders: evidence for learning impairments.

De novo fear conditioning paradigms have served as a model for how clinical anxiety may be acquired and maintained. To further examine variable findings in the acquisition and extinction of fear responses between clinical and nonclinical samples, we assessed de novo fear conditioning outcomes in outpatients with either anxiety disorders or depression and healthy subjects recruited from the community. Overall, we found evidence for attenuated fear conditioning, as measured by skin conductance, among the patient sample, with significantly lower fear acquisition among patients with depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.