Lecture Notes: Conceptualising Psychopathology (Vocabulary Flashcards)

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering key concepts from the lecture notes on conceptualising psychopathology, diagnosis, and modern frameworks.

Psychopathology

The study of illnesses of the mind.

DSM-5

Mainstream official classification of mental disorders; defines disorders by clinically significant syndromes with distress or disability, social non-normativity, and descriptive criteria.

RDOC (Research Domain Criteria)

A research framework organizing mental health problems across neural circuitry, biology, behavior, and self-report to study mental disorders beyond traditional categories.

PTMF (Power, Threat, Meaning Framework)

A framework viewing distress and apparent disorders as understandable reactions to stressful life experiences, emphasizing power, threats, and the meanings made of them.

Realism (in psychiatry/psychology)

Belief that the content of science is real and independent of human minds; examples include chemistry realism and biology realism.

Constructivism

View that mental disorders are socially constructed and real in a practical sense only via social conventions.

Anti-psychiatry

Movement arguing that psychiatric concepts are socially constructed; associated with critics like Szasz.

Homeostatic Property Clusters (HPC)

A framework that softens the search for a single essence by describing co-occurring properties that cluster together causally.

Symptom Network Approach

A model of mental disorders as networks of interacting symptoms rather than driven by one latent cause.

Latent Factor Model (Essentialism/Entitativity)

Idea that an underlying, stable brain-based cause explains all observed symptoms of a disorder.

Mechanistic Property Cluster (MPC)

A cluster of causal relationships across brain, body, and environment that sustains a disorder without a single underlying essence.

Descriptive vs Causal Classification

Descriptive groups summarize observed symptoms; causal groups seek underlying causes of those groupings.

Heterogeneity (Symptomatic/Causal)

A single diagnosis can have many different symptom patterns (symptomatic heterogeneity) and multiple underlying causes (causal heterogeneity).

DSM Criteria

Checklists of symptoms; meeting criteria is needed for a diagnosis, but criteria mainly index rather than fully describe the condition.

Panic Attack

Abrupt surge of intense fear with peak within minutes and at least four accompanying symptoms.

Panic Disorder

Recurrent, unexpected panic attacks with at least one month of concern about future attacks or maladaptive behavior changes.

Theory vs Formulation

A theory explains how something works; a formulation is an individual, case-specific explanation used to guide treatment.

Transdiagnostic Mechanism

A mechanism that operates across multiple disorders (e.g., anxiety sensitivity) rather than being disorder-specific.

Anxiety Sensitivity

Fear of anxiety-related sensations that contributes to various anxiety-related problems.

3E Cognition

Embodied, Embedded, Enactive cognition; mind is shaped by and arises from body-world interactions.

4E Cognition

Extends 3E by including Embodiment, Embedded, Enactive, and Extended (mind as distributed into the body and environment).

Embodiment

Cognition grounded in bodily processes and states.

Embedment

Cognition shaped by the environment and its ongoing interactions.

Enactivism

Cognition arising through active engagement with the world; meaning emerges from interaction.

Constitution

The idea that biological components (cells, neurons, neurotransmitters) exist as part of a larger organized system and must be understood in that context.

Ontological disrespectful

Term for the view that mental disorders do not neatly fit into purely biological or psychological categories.

Normative Perspective (3E/4E)

Mental disorders as patterns of sense-making that significantly hinder or disrupt functioning.

Emergence

The idea that a system’s organized form can produce new properties and causal effects not reducible to its parts.