Mental and Physical Health Vocabulary

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from a Mental and Physical Health lecture.

Behavioral Medicine

Integrates behavioral and medical knowledge to study factors contributing to emotional and physical health.

Health Psychology

A subfield of psychology that explores the impact of psychological, behavioral, and cultural factors on health and wellness.

Psychoneuroimmunology

The study of psychological, neural, and endocrine processes that together affect our immune system and resulting health.

Stress

The process of appraising and responding to a threatening or challenging event.

Stressors

Events that cause stress.

Walter Cannon

Psychologist who described the stress response as a unified mind-body system, leading to the outpouring of stress hormones.

Robert Sapolsky

Elaborated on the stress response system, noting the adrenal glands secrete epinephrine and glucocorticoids like cortisol.

Hans Selye

Developed the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS), describing the body's general reaction to stress regardless of the stimulus.

General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)

The body's three-phase reaction to stress: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion.

Tend and Befriend

A social reaction to stress, especially common in women, involving providing support to others and seeking support from others.

Oxytocin

A stress-moderating hormone associated with cuddling, massage, and breastfeeding, linked to the tend-and-befriend response.

Psychophysiological Illness

Mind-body illness; any stress-related physical illness such as hypertension and some headaches.

Lymphocytes

Two types of white blood cells (B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes) that are part of the body's immune system.

B lymphocytes

Form in bone marrow and release antibodies that fight bacterial infections.

T lymphocytes

Form in lymphatic tissue and attack cancer cells, viruses, and foreign substances.

Macrophage

A "big eater" cell that identifies, pursues, and ingests harmful invaders and worn-out cells.

Natural Killer Cells (NK)

Cells that pursue diseased cells, such as those infected by viruses or cancer.

Type A Personality

Characterized by time urgency, impatience, free-floating hostility, competitiveness, and a need for dominance.

Type B Personality

Characterized by flexibility, low stress, a relaxed attitude, even temperament, procrastination, patience, and creativity.

Catharsis

A release of emotional/aggressive energy through action or fantasy; aggressive/emotional urges tend to wane after catharsis.

Problem-focused coping

Attempting to alleviate stress by dealing directly with a problem/issue to improve the situation.

Emotion-focused coping

Attempting to alleviate stress by avoiding the stressor and attending to one’s emotional needs.

Learned Helplessness

The hopeless and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events.

Internal Locus of Control

The perception that you control your own fate; connects most to problem-focused coping.

External Locus of Control

The perception that chance or outside forces beyond your personal control determine your fate; connects most to emotion-focused coping.

Self Control

The ability to control impulses and delay short-term gratification.

Positive Psychology

An approach to behavior that looks at what makes people and society function at their best, focusing on strengths and virtues.

Adaptation Level Phenomenon

Our tendency to form judgements (of sounds, lights, income) relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience.

Relative Deprivation

The perception that we are worse off relative to those with whom we compare ourselves.

Broaden-and-build Theory

Positive emotions broaden our awareness which over time helps us build novel and meaningful skills and resilience that improves well being.

Mindfulness Meditation

A reflective practice in which people attend to their current personal experiences in a non judgemental and accepting manner.

Psychological Disorder

A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.

Maladaptive Behaviors

Behaviors that interfere with day-to-day life.

Medical Model

The concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and in most cases, cured.

Biopsychosocial Approach

The approach that all behavior (normal and abnormal) arises from the interaction of nature and nurture and considers biological, psychological, and social factors when treating disorders.

DSM-5

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; used to classify and diagnose psychological disorders.

Anxiety Disorders

A group of disorders characterized by excessive fear and anxiety and related maladaptive behaviors.

Social Anxiety Disorder

Intense fear and avoidance of social interactions.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

A person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.

Panic Disorder

Marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person may experience terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations.

Phobias

Marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.

Obsessive-compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions), actions (compulsions), or both.

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, hypervigilance, avoidance of trauma-related stimuli, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for 4 weeks or more after a traumatic experience.

Major Depressive Disorder

A person experiences 5 or more symptoms lasting two or more weeks, in the absence of drug use or a medical condition, at least 1 of which must be either a depressed mood or the loss of interest or pleasure.

Persistent Depressive Disorder

People experience a depressed mood on more days than not for at least 2 years.

Bipolar I Disorder

Most severe form of bipolar disorder that presents as a euphoric, talkative, highly energetic, and overly ambitious state that lasts for a week or longer.

Mania

A hyperactive, wildly optimistic state in which dangerously poor judgment is common (seen in Bipolar I Disorder).

Bipolar II Disorder

A less severe form of bipolar disorder in which people move between depression and a milder hypomania.

Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders

A group of disorders characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking or speech, disorganized or unusual motor behavior, and negative symptoms (such as diminished emotional expressions); includes schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder.

Psychotic Disorders

A group of disorders marked by irrational ideas, distorted perceptions, and a loss of contact with reality.

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)

A disruption of or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representations, motor control, and behavior.

Dissociative Fugue State

A sudden loss of memory or change in identity, often in response to an overwhelming stressful situation.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

A person (usually male) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members; may be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

Anorexia Nervosa

A person always sees themselves as overweight and goes on starvation diets.

Bulimia Nervosa

A person binges on food and then purges the food shortly thereafter via vomiting or laxative use.

Binge-eating disorder

Individuals binge but do NOT purge; they do however feel great remorse afterward.

Neurodevelopmental Disorders

Central Nervous System abnormalities that start in childhood and alter thinking and behavior.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Extreme inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity.

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

Eclectic Approach

A mix of all therapies to treat disorders.

Psychoanalysis

A Freudian approach aiming to release repressed feelings and energy from the unconscious.

Psychodynamic Approach

Focuses on current relationships, childhood experiences, and rapport with the therapist to reveal issues in the present; does not heavily emphasize unconscious motives as psychoanalysis does but is still considered an 'insight therapy.'

Humanistic Model

It focuses on the inherent potential for self-fulfillment.

Client/Person-centered Therapy

Active listening where therapist echoes, restates, and clarifies clients’ feelings/ideas.

Behavior Therapy

Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.

Systematic Desensitization

Associates a pleasant, relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli.

Classical conditioning

A learning process that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired; a response that is at first elicited by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone.

Operant conditioning

A type of learning in which (a) the strength of a behavior is modified by the behavior's consequences, such as reward or punishment, and (b) the behavior is controlled by antecedents called 'discriminative stimuli' which come to signal those consequences.

Flooding

A technique in behavior therapy in which the individual is exposed directly to a maximum-intensity anxiety-producing situation or stimulus, either described or real, without any attempt made to lessen or avoid anxiety or fear during the exposure.

Aversive Conditioning

A type of conditioning where one associates unpleasant states (e.g., nausea) with unwanted behavior (e.g., drinking).

Token Economy

An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token of some sort for exhibiting a desired behavior and can later exchange tokens for various privileges and rewards.

Cognitive Therapies

Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; is based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.

Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)

A confrontational cognitive therapy that vigorously challenges people’s illogical, absurd, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

A popular integrative therapy that combines cognitive therapy (changing self-defeating thinking) with behavior therapy (changing behavior).

Drug Therapies

Drugs used to treat schizophrenia and other forms of severe thought disorders.

Antidepressants

Drugs used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, OCD, and PTSD. Most common are "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s)."

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

A biomedical therapy for severely depressed patients in which a brief electric current is sent through the anesthetized patient.

Lobotomy

A psychosurgical procedure once used to calm uncontrollably emotional or violent patients; the procedure cut the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.