AP PSYCHOLOGY UNIT 8: Clinical Psychology Set ll

Delusions

False beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders.

Hallucinations

False sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.

Somatic Symptom Disorder

A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.

Conversion Disorder

A disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no physiological basis can be found. (Also called functional neurological symptom disorder.)

Illness Anxiety Disorder

A disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease. (Formerly called hypochondriasis.)

Dissociative Disorder

Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (disassociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.

DID

A rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder.

Anorexia Nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly (15 percent or more) underweight.

Bulimia Nervosa

An eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high-calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use) or fasting.

Binge-Eating Disorder

Significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging or fasting that marks bulimia nervosa.

Personality Disorder

Psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.

Antisocial Disorder

A personality disorder in which a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

Psychotherapy

Treatment involving psychological techniques; consists of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Biomedical Therapy

Prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person’s physiology.

Eclectic Approach

An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.

Psychoanalysis

Freud’s therapeutic technique. Freud believed the patient’s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences - and the therapist’s interpretations of them - released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.

Resistance

In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.

Interpretation

In psychoanalysis, the analyst’s noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.

Transference

In psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent).

Psychodynamic Therapy

Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.