AbPsy Chapter 3.3 Typical Signs and Symptoms in Psychopathology

Emotion

a complex feeling or state related to mood and affect with psychic, somatic, and behavioral components.

Affect

the expression or outward manifestation of emotion observable to others.

Appropriate affect

1. a normal condition wherein emotional tone is in harmony or is consistent with the accompanying thought, idea, or speech. It is also described as broad or full affect wherein a full range of emotions is appropriately expressed.

Inappropriate affect

inconsistency between the emotional tone and the idea, thought, or speech accompanying it.

Blunted affect

characterized by a severe reduction in the intensity of the externalized feeling tone.

Restricted or constricted affect

reduction in the intensity of feeling tone. It is less severe than blunted affect.

Flat affect

the absence or near absence of any signs of affective expression. It can be characterized by an immobile face and a monotonous voice.

Labile affect

1. rapid and abrupt changes in the emotional feeling tone which is unrelated to an external stimuli.

Mood

the sustained and pervasive emotion subjectively experienced and reported by the patient, and is observable to others.

Dysphoric Mood

unpleasant mood

Euthymic Mood

1. normal range of mood

Expansive Mood

1. the expression of one's feelings without any restraint. It is frequently and overestimation of one's significance or importance.

Irritable Mood

1. the person is easily provoked to anger and is easily annoyed.

Mood Swings (labile mood)

1. moving between euphoria and depression or anxiety.

Elevated Mood

1. - characterized by an air of enjoyment and confidence. A mood which is more cheerful than normal but is not considered pathological.

Euphoria

intense elation with feelings of grandeur.

Ecstasy

1. - feeling of intense rapture or delight.

Depression

the psychopathological feeling of sadness.

Anhedonia

loss of interest and withdrawal from all regular and pleasurable activities. Often associated with depression.

Grief or Mourning

sadness that is appropriate to a real loss.

Alexithymia

1. the inability or difficulty in describing one's moods or emotions.

Thinking

the goal-directed flow of ideas. Symbols and associations initiated by problem or task and leading toward a reality-oriented conclusion.

Mental disorder

an illness that affects the mind and reduces a person's ability to function, to adjust to change, or to get along with others

Psychosis

inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Impairment in reality testing, with creation of a new reality.

Reality testing

1. the objective evaluation and judgment of the world outside the self.

Formal thought disorder

disturbance in the form of thought instead of the content of thought. Thinking is characterized by loosened associations, neologisms, and illogical constructs. Thought process is disordered and the person defined psychotic.

Illogical thinking

thinking containing erroneous conclusions or internal contradictions. It is considered psychopathological only when it is marked and when not caused by cultural values or intellectual deficit.

Dereism

mental activity not concordant with logic experience.

Autistic Thinking

thinking that gratifies unfulfilled desires but has no regard for reality; a preoccupation phase in children in which thoughts, words, or actions assume power.

Magical thinking

a form of dereistic thought; thinking similar to that of the preoperational phase in children (Jean Piaget), in which thoughts, words, or actions assume power (e.g., to cause or to prevent events).

Primary process thinking

1. general term for thinking that is dereistic; illogical and magical; normally found in dreams, abnormally in psychotics.

Delusion

false belief, based on incorrect inference about external reality, not consistent with patient's intelligence and cultural background that cannot be corrected by reasoning

Bizarre delusion

a. - false belief that is patently absurd or fantastic (e.g., invaders from space have implanted electrodes in a person's brain), common in schizophrenia.

Systematized delusion

a. group of elaborate delusions related to a single event or theme.

Mood-congruent delusion

delusion with content that is mood appropriate (e.g., depressed patients who believe that they are responsible for the destruction of the world).

Mood-incongruent delusion

delusion with content that has no association to mood or is mood-neutral.

Nihilistic delusion

depressive delusion that the world and everything related to it have ceased to exist.

Delusion of poverty

false belief that one is bereft or will be deprived of all material possessions

Somatic Delusion

delusion pertaining to the functioning of one's body.

Paranoid delusions

a. includes persecutory delusions and delusions of reference, control, and grandeur

Delusion of persecution

a) false belief of being harassed or persecuted; often found in litigious patients who have a pathological tendency to take legal action because of imagined mistreatment. (most common delusion)

Delusion of grandeur

exaggerated conception of one's importance, power, or identity.

Delusion of reference

a) false belief that the behavior of others refers to oneself or that events, objects, or other people have a particular and unusual significance, usually of a negative nature; derived from idea of reference, in which persons falsely feel that others are talking about them (e.g., belief that people on television or radio are talking to or about the person). See also thought broadcasting.

Delusion of self-accusation

false feeling of remorse and guilt. Seen in depression with psychotic features.

Delusion of control

a. false belief that a person's will, thoughts, or feelings are being controlled by external forces.

Thought withdrawal

delusion that one's thoughts are being removed from one's mind by other people or forces.

Thought insertion

delusion that thoughts are being implanted in one's mind by other people or forces.

Thought broadcasting

feeling that one's thoughts are being broadcast or projected into the environment.

Delusion of infidelity

false belief that one's lover is unfaithful. Sometimes called pathological jealousy.

Erotomania

delusional belief, more common in women than in men, that someone is deeply in love with them (also known as de Clérembault syndrome).

Pseudologia fantastica

a type of lying, in which the person appears to believe in the reality of his or her fantasies and acts on them.

Perception

process of transferring physical stimulation into psychological information; the mental process by which sensory stimuli are brought into awareness.

Hallucination

1. false sensory perception not associated with real external stimuli; there may or may not be a delusional interpretation of the hallucinatory experience; hallucinations indicate a psychotic disturbance only when associated with impairment in reality testing

Hypnagogic Hallucination

a. false sensory perception occurring while falling asleep; generally considered a non-pathological phenomenon.

Hypnopompic Hallucination

false perception occurring while awakening from sleep; generally considered non-pathological.

Auditory Hallucination

a. false perception of sound, usually voices but also other noises such as music; most common hallucination in psychiatric disorders.

Visual Hallucination

a. false perception involving sight consisting of both formed images(e.g. people) and unformed images (e.g. flashes of light); most common in organically determined disorders.

Olfactory Hallucination

a. false perception in smell; most common in organic disorders.

Gustatory Hallucination

a. - false perception of taste, such as unpleasant taste caused by an uncinate seizure; most common in organic disorders.

Tactile (Haptic) Hallucination

false perception of touch or surface sensation, as from an amputated limb (phantom limb), crawling sensation on or under the skin (formication).

Somatic Hallucination

a. false sensation of things occurring in or to the body, most often visceral in origin (also known as cenesthetsic hallucination).

Lilliputian Hallucination

false perception in which objects are seen as reduced in size (also termed micropsia).

Mood-congruent Hallucination

a. a kind of hallucination wherein the content of which is consistent with either a depressed or manic mood (e.g. a depressed patient hears voices saying that the patient is a bad person; a manic patient hears voices saying that the patient is inflated of worth, power, knowledge, etc.)

Mood-incongruent Hallucination

hallucination in which the content is not consistent with either a depressed or manic mood

Hallucinosis

a. Hallucinations, most often auditory, that are associated with chronic alcohol abuse and that occur within a clear sensorium.

Trailing Phenomenon

perceptual abnormality associated with hallucinogenic drugs in which moving object are seen as a series of discrete and discontinuous stages.

Illusion

1. misperception or misinterpretation of real external sensory stimuli.