Nursing Psych 1.1: Vocabulary

Affect

A patient’s expression of emotion

Akathisia

Motor restlessness

Alexithymia

The inability to describe emotions with how one is feeling

Anhedonia

The lack of experiencing pleasure in activities normally found enjoyable

Blunted

A diminished range and intensity of affect or mood

Chief complaint

The patient’s primary reasons for seeking care

Circumstantial

Speaking with many unnecessary or tedious details without getting to the point of the conversation

Clang associations

Stringing words together that rhyme without logical association and do not convey rational meaning

Clouded consciousness

A state of reduced awareness to stimuli

Congruence

Consistency of verbal and nonverbal communication

Countertransference

A tendency for the examiner to displace (transfer) their own feelings onto the patient, and these feelings may influence the patient

Delirium

An onset of an abnormal mental state, often with fluctuating levels of consciousness, disorientation, irritability, and hallucinations

Delusions

A fixed false belief not held by cultural peers persisting in the face of objective contradictory evidence

Distractibility

A state when the client’s attention is easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli

Dyskinesia

Uncontrolled, involuntary movements

Dysphoric

A patients mood or affect exhibiting persistent sadness or depression

Euphoric

A pathologically elevated sense of well-being

Euthymic

Normal affect and mood with a wide range of emotion appropriate for the situation

Flight of ideas

A state where the client frequently shifts from one topic to another with rapid speech, making it seem fragmented

Grandiose delusions

A state of false attribution to the self of great ability, knowledge, importance or worth, identity, prestige, power, or accomplishment

Hallucinations

False sensory perceptions not associated with real external stimuli that can include any of the five senses

Illusions

Misperceptions of real stimuli

Labile

Rapid changes in emotional responses, mood, or affect that are inappropriate for the moment or situation.

Loose associations

Jumping from one idea to an unrelated idea in the same sentence

Mood

The predominant emotion expressed by an individual

Persistent thoughts, ideas, images, or impulses that are experienced as intrusive or inappropriate and result in anxiety, distress, or discomfort

Poverty of content

A conversation in which the client talks without stating anything related to the question, or their speech in general is vague and meaningless

Psychomotor agitation

A condition of purposeless, non-goal directed activity

Psychomotor retardation

A condition of extremely slow physical movements, slumped posture, or slow speech patterns

Rumination

Obsessional thinking involving excessive, repetitive thoughts that interfere with other forms of mental activity.

Transference

When the patient projects their feelings to the nurse