Psychopathology - Chap 1-2

Midterm 1

Psychological Disorder

Psychological Disorder

A pattern of thoughts, feelings, or behaviors that causes significant personal distress, impairment in daily life and/or risk of harm

(All 3 do not need to be present)

Distress

Anguish or suffering → degree of distress or circumstance that the distress arises that mark abnormality

Severe distress/lack of distress indicates the presence of a disorder

Ex) Someone abusing substances may not feel distress but still has a disorder

Impairment in daily life

Significant reduction of a persons ability to function in some areas of life

Ex) Substance abuse may affect someone’s ability to work and therefore to pay bills

Atypical in the context or situation → beyond what is reasonable

Risk of harm

Risky behavior outside the normal range

Symptoms that lead to life or property being put at risk either intentionally or not → can lead to putting other lives at risk

Ex) Someone with substance abuse disorder driving at high speeds while impaired

Hallucinations

Sensations so vivid the perceived objects/events seems real but are not - Most commonly auditory

Arise in a context that renders it unusual & impairs functioning

Delusions

Persistent false beliefs that are held despite evidence that they are incorrect or exagerrated

Paranoid/persecutory: someone is after them

Delusional jealousy: Partner is dating/interested in others

Grandoise delusion: More powerful, knowledgable, influential than is true or is someone else

Somatic delusion: Defective body part

Earliest accounts of psychopathology focused on

Flashcard:

1. Supernatural forces: mentally ill possessed by spirits and demons → treatment consisted of exorcism

2. Imbalance of substances in the body

   • Chinese qi blocked or imbalanced

   • Greeks and romans → black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm (4 elements)

Hippocrates

Suggested the brain is responsible for mental activity and that mental illness arises from abnormalities in the brain

“Medical model”

Rene Descartes

Proposed mind and body are distinct → bodily illness arises from abnormalities in the body and mental illness arises from abnormalities in the mind

John Locke

Insanity is caused by irrational thinking

Phillipe Pinel

Removed patients chains and stopped treatments involving bleeding, starvation, and physical punishments

Believed madness is a disease

Identified “Partial insanity”

Moral Treatment

Mental illness seen as a temporary state where person was deprived of reason

Provided and environment where people with mental illness were treated with kindness and respect

90% temporarily recovered but moral treatment stopped when institutions became overcrowded → new goal was sedation and management

Free association

Freuds technique which patients were encouraged to say whatever thoughts occur to them → “the talking cure”

Idea that mental disorders arise because of unconscious conflicts and talking would reduce that tension

3 levels of consciousness

1. The conscious: Thoughts and feelings that are in awareness

2. The preconscious: Thoughts and feelings that a person does not perceive but can be brought voluntarily into awareness

3. The unconscious: Thoughts and feelings that cannot be perceived or called into awareness on command but have influence

3 psychological structures of the mind

1. The id: seat of sexual and aggressive desires. The desire for immediate gratification of physical and psychological needs

2. The superego: seat of conscience which works to impose morality

3. The ego: tries to mediate ids demands for gratification and superegos high standards of morality and constraints of external reality

When the ego is weak, it is less able to manage conflicts among the id, superego and reality → anxiety etc.

2 Categories of mental illness

1. Neurosis: pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that express an unresolved conflict between ego and id or ego and superego

2. Psychosis: Break from reality characterized by conflict between the ego’s view of reality and reality itself

Defense mechanisms

Work to transform the conflicts in a way that prevents unacceptable thoughts and feelings from reaching the consciousness

Can decrease anxiety if successful

Repression, Denial, Rationalization

Repression: Unintentionally keeping conflict including thoughts and feelings out of conscious awareness

Denial: Not acknowledging the conflict inducing thoughts/feelings to self

Rationalization: Justifying the conflict inducing thoughts/feelings with explanations

Projection, Reaction Formation, Channeling

Projection: Ascribing the conflict inducing thoughts/feelings onto others

Reaction formation: Transforming the conflict inducing thoughts/feelings into their opposite

Channeling: the conflict inducing thoughts/feelings into less threatening behaviors

Mental processes & Mental contents

Mental processes: Internal operations that underlie cognitive and emotional functions and most human behavior

Mental contents: Specific material that is stored in the mind and operated on by mental processes

Humanistic Psychology

Free will, innate goodness, creativity and the self

Symptoms of mental illness arise when a route to growth is blocked → person lacks coherent/unified sense of self, mismatch between ideal and real self

Behaviorism

Understanding directly observable behaviors rather than unobservable mental processes and contents

A persons behavior can result from learning → previous association with an object, situation or event

Cognitive psychology

Studies mental processes and contents starting from the analogy of information processing by a computer

Distortion of peoples thoughts → treatment involves reconstructing peoples fault beliefs and irrational thoughts

Diathesis

Stress model - rests on a claim that a psychological disorder is triggered when a person with a predisposition (diathesis) for the particular disorder experiences an environmental event that causes significant stress → The same stress would not affect someone without that predisposition

Biopsychosocial approach

Psychological disorders arise from the combined influence of 3 types of factors: biological, psychological and social

Etiology

Factors that lead a person to develop a psychological disorder

1. Neuro factors: Something abnormal about genes - brain structure/neurons/neurotransmitters

2. Psych factors: How might thoughts/feelings motivate - role of mental process

3. Social factors: financial circumstances, family, society, cultural processes

CNS and PNS

Central Nervous System: Brain and spinal cord → Seat of memory, consciousness, perception and voluntary action

Peripheral Nervous System: Sensory somatic NS & Automatic NS

SSNS & ANS

Sensory Somatic Nervous System → Connecting brain to world via senses (inputs) and muscles (outputs)

*Automatic Nervous System → How we respond to stress - Involuntary functions: heart, digestive track, blood vessels

SNS & PNS

Sympathetic Nervous System: Responds to emergency (revs up) → speeds the heart, dilate pupils, slow down non-essential functions - “fight or flight”

Parasympathetic Nervous System: Settles down after crisis → slows the heart, contract pupils, increase digestive track, counter affects of SNS

• Psychopathology may arise if these systems fail

Occipital and parietal lobe

Occipital: Function of vision, first area to process information in detail

Parietal: Processes spatial information (relative location), role in self-awareness, neural pathway from occipital lobe

Temporal lobe

Stores visual memories, processes auditory information, decodes the meaning of speech, contributes to conscious experience

Abnormal function → Intense emotions

Frontal lobe

The seat of executive functioning - receives information from parietal and temporal, role in feeling emotion and using emotional responses, thinking and problem solving, programing actions and controlling body movements

Abnormal function → variety of psychological disorders including schizophrenia

Phineas Gage

Metal rod through his eye and took out his frontal lobe on one side

Before accident was a good, reliable employee/person - After the accident became out of character, took big risks, unreliable

You can survive with massive disruptions to your frontal lobe

Limbic system

1. Hypothalamus: bodily functions → eating and drinking, controlling temperature, emotions and experience of pleasure

   “Eating, sleeping, sex, drugs” → substance use disorders and eating disorders

2. Amygdala: Producing and perceiving strong emotions, especially fear

3. Hippocampus: stores new info in memory that can later be voluntarily recalled

Basal Ganglia

Runs our behavioral programs and automatic responses

Psychopathology results from developing habitual routines in thinking

• Ex) OCD - doing a compulsion is a habitual basal ganglia way of behaving

• Your frontal lobes would have to work to inhibit the basal ganglia to break the OCD compulsion pattern

3 types of neurons

1. Sensory neurons: Receive input from the sense organs (eyes, ears, etc)

2. Motor neurons: Carry output that stimulates muscles and glands

3. Interneurons: Lie between other neurosensory neurons, motor neurons, and/or other interneurons and make up the majority of neurons in the brain

Receptors

Specialized sites on dendrites and cell bodies that respond only to specific molecules

Ex) Locks that only a certain key fit into

Neurotransmitter molecules bind to receptors and affect by exciting/inhibiting them

Reuptake

Process of moving leftover neurotransmitter molecules in the synapse back into sending neuron

Reuptake not operating correctly may contribute to a psychological disorder

Cortisol

Produced by adrenal glands, helps the body cope with challenges by making more resources available

Abnormal amounts → anxiety and depression

Cortisol is needed as a stress result - stress in its acute form is critical, chronic stress is stress you are creating

Epigenetics

Expression of genes can be modified by your behavior

Genotypes: sum of organisms genes (hemophilia)

Phenotypes: sum of observable traits (brown eyes, blonde hair)

Complex Inheritance

The transmission of traits that are expressed along a continuum by interaction of sets of genes

Almost all psych disorders have a genetic component

Behavioral genetics

Field that investigates the degree to which the variability of characteristics in a population (always exceptions at the individual level) arises from genetic vs. environmental factors

• What is the role of genetics in causing the disorder?

• What is the role of the environment?

• What is the role of interactions between genes and the environment?

Heritability

Estimate of how much of the variation in a characteristic within a population can be attributed to genetics

Ex) 1/3 of the variation in generalized anxiety disorder in Western countries is genetically determined

• Genetic makeup, predisposition, diagnosis → some to do with genetics by not an absolute

Critique of twin studies

Studying twins separated at birth and raised in different homes and comparing twins raised in the same home BUT they are raised in similar, predominantly white, middle class families

3 ways genes affect the environment

1. Passive Interaction: The parents genes affect the child’s environment and the child passively receives these influences

   • Ex) Shy parents kids learn parents shyness

2. Evocative Interaction: A person’s inherited traits encourage other people to behave in particular ways, and a person’s social environment will be affected by his/her genes

   • Ex) Shy parents with hyperactive kid

3. Active Interaction: We all actively seek out some environment and avoid others, and our genes influence which environments feel most comfortable to us

   • Ex) Extraverts seek out more social environments than introverts

ALL TO DO WITH TEMPERAMENT!

Watson and Rayner

Little Albert → Conditioned to be scared of furry things

Stimulus generalization: Fear of white rats generalized to white rabbits, white fur, white beard etc.

Ethical problems: didn’t uncondition the fear

Operant conditioning - Positive reinforcement

Occurs when a desired reinforcer is received after a behavior, wherein the behavior is likely to occur again

Ex) Giving a dog who sits a treat

Operant conditioning - Negative reinforcement

Occurs when an aversive stimulus is removed after a behavior, wherein the behavior is likely to be produced again

Ex) Nagging → take out the garbage so the nagging will stop

Operant conditioning - Positive punishment

Occurs when behavior is followed by an undesirable consequence which makes the behavior less likely to occur

Ex) Adding chores and responsibilities when rules aren’t followed

Operant conditioning - Negative punishment

Occurs when a behavior is followed by the removal of a pleasant or desired event, which decreases the probability of the behaviors recurrence

Ex) Timeout

Learned Helplessness

State of giving up that arises when a person/animal is in an aversive situation where no action seems effective

Ex) Abusive relationships, child abuse, domestic violence, animal abuse

Punishment become non-contingent → no trigger, it just comes

It is NOT operant conditioning → “learning theory gone wrong”

Efficacy: undoing learned helplessness by completing small tasks to take control of your environment - regaining control