Personality Disorders and Paraphilias

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture notes.

Paranoid Personality Disorder

Paranoia focused on a specific aspect or situation, suspicion of others' motives, and general trust issues with globally normal behavior.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder

A general personality disorder involving cognitive and behavioral oddities, including symptoms of Schizophrenia that are not severe enough to warrant a diagnosis of Schizophrenia, mild perceptual and cognitive distortions such as odd beliefs and unusual perceptual experiences, and odd/eccentric behaviors such as odd speech patterns.

Criterion A (Personality Disorder Diagnosis)

An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from cultural expectations, manifested in cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control.

Criterion B (Personality Disorder Diagnosis)

The enduring pattern is inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations.

Criterion C (Personality Disorder Diagnosis)

The enduring pattern leads to clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

Criterion D (Personality Disorder Diagnosis)

The pattern is stable and of long duration, with onset traced back to adolescence or early adulthood.

Cluster A Personality Disorders

Characterized by odd or eccentric behaviors and thought patterns.

Histrionic Personality Disorder

Characterized by exaggerated emotionality, a need to be the center of attention, inappropriately sexual and seductive behavior, and a sense of superficiality. Underlying function involves seeking attention and connection.

Topography vs. Underlying Functions

Topography refers to what the behavior looks like, while underlying functions refer to why the person is doing it or what the behavior is trying to achieve. The differentiation among disorders lies in the underlying functions.

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD)

Characterized by a disregard for and violation of the rights of others, deceitfulness, impulsivity, irritability, reckless disregard for safety, consistent irresponsibility, and lack of remorse.

Psychopathy

Similar to ASPD but includes grandiosity, arrogance, superficiality, an inability to form emotional bonds, and a lack of anxiety. It encompasses traits beyond criminal behavior.

Early Learning Environment (ASPD Development)

Characterized by either passive/neglectful parenting or overly harsh parenting styles. Leads to deficits in acquiring learning and fear responses and chronic low levels of arousal.

Cluster C Personality Disorders

Characterized by anxious and fearful behavior, including avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders.

Avoidant Personality Disorder

Feelings of extreme social inhibition, inadequacy, and sensitivity to negative criticism and rejection.

Dependent Personality Disorder

Feelings of helplessness, submissiveness, dependence, and reassurance-seeking; difficulty making independent decisions.

Healthy Narcissism

Maintaining a positive view of oneself in a balanced way, seeking validation without harming others, and being motivated to grow and succeed.

Grandiose Narcissism

Conceited, domineering attitudes, a lack of recognition of failure, repression of negative aspects of self, and an inflated self-image.

Vulnerable Narcissism

Fragile self-esteem, hypersensitivity, prone to narcissistic injury, and emotional states characterized by shame, anxiety, depression, and feelings of inadequacy.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

Characterized by instability in emotion, cognition, behavior, sense of self, and interpersonal relationships, profound fears of abandonment, and desperate bids to avoid abandonment.

Invalidating Environment (BPD Development)

Parental responses to a child's inner experiences are met with inappropriate or erratic responses from parents or caregivers, leading to instability in self-concept.

BPD: Stable Instability

Instability in mood, self-image, relationships, behavior, and self-harm.

Core Features of BPD (Linehan)

Affective instability, rapid mood changes, extreme reactivity to the environment, and a dysthymic baseline mood.

Biosocial Theory of BPD

Proposes BPD is caused by the combination of biological vulnerabilities, such as high emotional sensitivity, intense emotional reactions and slow recovery, with an invalidating family environment, where emotions are often ignored or dismissed.

Insecure Attachment (BPD)

Arises when caregivers are neglectful or abusive leading to unreliable relationship expectations. Disorganized and preoccupied/anxious are most linked with BPD.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

A preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency.

Paraphilia

Sexual arousal to non-normative or deviant stimuli and the associated sexual behavior. It represents deviations in the qualitative aspect of sexuality or the direction of sexual feelings.

Paraphilic Disorder

The unusual sexual interest that causes distress, harm, or problems in life.

Fetishism

Erotic attraction to non-living objects.

Voyeurism

When a person get sexually aroused by secretly watching someone who is naked, changing clothes, or having sex- without the person knowing.

Classical conditioning (Paraphilias)

The pairing of a neutral stimulus with sexual arousal.

Imprinting (Paraphilias)

Early sexual experiences the shaping of subsequent sexual desires and fantasies.

Psychopathy (Cleckley)

Characterized by superficial charm, lack of remorse, inadequately motivated antisocial behavior, poor judgment, pathological egocentricity, and general poverty in major affective reactions.

Gray’s BIS/BAS Model

Behavioral Activation System (BAS) responds to reward cues, drives approach behavior, and is associated with impulsivity. Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) responds to punishment cues, inhibits behavior, and is associated with anxiety. Psychopathy is most linked to deficits in the BIS.

Amygdala (Psychopathy)

Key brain area involved in learning deficits, particularly in aversive conditioning and emotion-related learning. Psychopathy involves abnormalities here.

Response Modulation Hypothesis (RMH)

Psychopaths have a deficit in shifting attention when relevant cues are peripheral to their primary focus of attention, an 'attention bottleneck'.