Psychopathology and Social Psychology Lecture Review

A comprehensive vocabulary review of abnormal psychology, mental health disorders, dissociative phenomena, and social psychology principles based on lecture chapters 1 through 6.

Psychopathology

The study of abnormal behavior.

Disorders

Any pattern of behavior and or thinking that causes people significant distress, causes them to harm themselves or others.

Abnormal behavior

Behavior that is atypical, dysfunctional, distressful, and or deviant.

Dysfunctional

A behavior that interferes with daily life and relationships.

Distress

Feeling upset or uncomfortable because of unwanted behaviors or behavior thoughts.

Deviance

The degree in which behavior is outside the norm.

Psychology student syndrome

When a psychology student tries to self diagnose or diagnose someone else.

Anxiety disorders

Excessive, unrealistic anxiety, and or debilitating irrational fears.

Phobia

An irrational persistent fear of an object, situation, or social activity that poses little to no threat or danger.

Social anxiety disorder

A fear of interacting with others or being in social situations that might lead to a negative evaluation.

Acrophobia

A fear of heights.

Obsessive compulsive disorder

Intruding recurring thoughts or obsession that create anxiety that is relieved by performing a repetitive ritualistic behavior.

Panic attack

A sudden fear or discomfort that evaluates quickly, often with no obvious trigger.

Panic disorder

Panic attacks occurring frequently.

Generalized anxiety disorder

Excessive amount of worry and anxiety about activities relating to family, health, school, and other aspects of daily life.

PTSD

A condition occurring when a person has exposed, witnessed, or experienced the details of a traumatic experience that involves actual or threatening death, serious injury, or sexual violence.

Major depressive disorder

At least one major depressive episode with symptoms such as depressed moods, problems with sleep, and loss of energy, loss of interest, or pleasure in almost all activities.

Bipolar disorders

States of continuous elation that are out of proportion to the setting and can include irritability, very high and sustained levels of energy, and expansive moods.

Flight of ideas

An abrupt shift from one topic to another.

Bipolar 1

Experiencing at least one manic episode, substantial distress, and great impairment.

Bipolar 2

At least one major depressive episode as well as hypomanic episodes.

Hypomania

Having some symptoms as major episodes, but not as severe.

Delusion

A false belief that is firmly maintained even when presented with evidence to the contrary.

Delusion of grandeur

A belief that might include that one has special talents, abilities, and or is famous or extremely more important.

Delusions of persuasion

The beliefs that others are trying to harm one in some way.

Illusion

Perceptual distortion in the presence of a stimuli.

Hallucination

Perceptual like experiences that an individual believes are real but are not evident to others.

Derailment

A thought disorder characterized by discourse consisting of a sequence of unrelated or only remotely related ideas, where the frame of reference often changes from one to the next.

Schizophrenia

A severely disabling disorder that includes delusion, hallucinations, disorganized speech, disorganized thinking, psychosis, abnormal psychomotor behavior, and flat or inappropriate affect.

Typical age of onset for schizophrenia

Late teens for boys and early twenties for girls.

Psychosis

The inability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

Neurosis

Maladaptive thought patterns and behavior patterns.

Dissociative disorders

Disorders characterized by dissociating with one's core sense of self and problems with memory.

Dissociative amnesia

Difficulty remembering important personal information and life events.

Dissociative fugue

A state in which an individual wanders about in a confused state.

Depersonalization

Feelings of unreality or detachment or feeling unfamiliar with one's whole self or from aspects of the self.

Derealization

Detachment from the world, be it individuals, imminent objects, or all surroundings.

Dissociative identity disorder

Involves the occurrence of two or more distinct personalities within an individual, with gaps in day to day events and personal information.

Illness anxiety disorder

A disorder where persons are preoccupied with their health and fear that physical symptoms are signs of some serious disease despite reassurances from doctors to the contrary.

Psychosomatic disorder

An illness that connects the mind and body, occurring in such a way that the psychological functioning of the body is affected by psychological tension.

Convention disorder

A condition where a person suffers loss of motor or sensory function in some part of the body with no known medical explanation.

Personality disorder

When a person adopts an enduring persistent, rigid, and maladaptive pattern of thinking and behaving that interferes with normal social interactions.

Cognitive dissidence

The state of psychological discomfort an individual feels when their actions and beliefs are not in accordance with one another.

Deceptive study

Employing the use of deception in an experiment.

Confederates

An actor who participates in a psychological experiment, pretending to be a participant, but in actuality, working for the researcher.

Conformity

The urge to match behavior, attitudes, beliefs, and or options to match those of others.

Obedience

Changing behavior because we have been told to do so by an authority figure.

Attributions

Beliefs one develops to explain human behavior and characteristics as well as situations.

Fundamental attributions error

Overestimating how much another's behavior can be explained by dispositional factors.

Bystander effect

The phenomenon where as the number of bystanders increases, the probability that the victim will receive help decreases, attributed to perceived diffusion of responsibility.

Persuasion

The process of changing attitude towards something based on some kind of communication.

Foot in the door technique

Getting people to agree first to a smaller request, making them more likely to accept a larger request later.

Foot in the face technique

Asking people to accept a larger request first, then a smaller request.