AP Psychology: Chapter 12 - Psychological Disorders

Affect

A term referring to emotion or mood.

Agoraphobia

A fear of public places and open spaces, commonly accompanying panic disorder.

Anorexia Nervosa

An eating disorder that involves persistent loss of appetite that endangers an individual's health and stems from emotional or psychological reasons rather than from organic causes.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

Characterized by a long standing pattern of irresponsible behavior indicating a lack of conscience and a diminished sense of responsibility to others.

Anxiety Disorders

Mental problems characterized mainly by anxiety. Anxiety disorders include panic disorder, specific phobias, and obsessive - compulsive disorder.

Attention - Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

A developmental disability involving short attention span, distractibility, and extreme difficulty in remaining inactive for any period.

Autism

A developmental disorder marked by disabilities in language, social interaction, and the ability to understand another person's state of mind.

Bipolar Disorder

A mental abnormality involving swings of mood from mania to depression.

Borderline Personality Disorder

An unstable personality given to impulsive behavior.

Bulimia Nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by eating binges followed by "purges" induced vomiting or laxatives; typically initiated as a weight - control measure.

Conversion Disorder

A type of somatoform disorder, marked by paralysis, weakness or loss of sensation but with no discernible physical cause.

Delusions

Extreme disorders of thinking, involving persistent false beliefs. ___ are the hallmark of paranoid disorders.

Depersonalization Disorder

An abnormality involving the sensation that mind and body have separated, as in an "out of body" experience.

Diathesis - Stress Hypothesis

In reference to schizophrenia, the proposal that says that genetic factors place the individual at risk while environmental stress factors transform this potential into an actual schizophrenic disorder.

Dissociative Amnesia

A psychologically induced loss of memory for personal information, such as one's identity or residence.

Dissociative Disorders

A group of pathologies involving "fragmentation" of the personality, in which some parts of the personality have become detached or dissociated from other parts.

Dissociative Fugue

Essentially the same dissociative amnesia, but with the addition of "flight" from one's home, family, and job.

Dissociative Identity Disorder

A condition in which an individual; displays multiple identities, or personalities; formerly called "multiple personality disorder."

DSM - IV

The fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association; the classification system most widely accepted psychiatric in the United States.

Dyslexia

A reading disability, thought by some experts to involve a brain disorder.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

A psychological problem characterized by persistent and pervasive feelings of anxiety, without any external cause.

Hallucinations

False sensory experiences that may suggest mental disorder. ___ can have other causes, such as drugs or sensory isolation.

Hypochondriasis

A somatoform disorder involving excessive concerns about health and disease.

Insanity

A legal term, not a psychological or psychiatric one, referring to a person who is unable, because of a mental disorder or defect, to conform his or her behavior to the law.

Major Depression

A form of depression that does not alternate with mania.

Medical Model

The view that mental disorders are diseases that, like ordinary physical diseases, have objective physical causes and require specific treatments.

Mood Disorders

Abnormal disturbances in emotion or mood, including bipolar disorder and unipolar disorder. Area also called affective disorders.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Characterized by a grandiose sense of self importance, a preoccupation with fantasies of success or power, and a need for constant attention or admiration.

Neurosis

Before the DSM-IV, this term was used as a label for subjective distress or self defeating behavior that did not show signs of brain abnormalities or grossly irrational thinking.

Obsessive - Compulsive Disorder

A condition characterized by patterns of persistent, unwanted thoughts and behaviors.

Panic Disorder

A disturbance marked by panic attacks that have no obvious connection with events in the person's present experience. unlike generalized anxiety disorder, the victim is usually free of anxiety between panic attacks.

Personality Disorders

Conditions involving a chronic, pervasive, inflexible and maladaptive pattern of thinking, emotion, social relationships or impulse control.

Phobias

A group of anxiety disorders involving a pathological fear of a specific object.

Preparedness Hypothesis

The notion that we have an innate tendency, acquired through natural selection, to respond quickly and automatically to stimuli that posed a survival threat to our ancestors.

Psychopathology

Any pattern of emotions, behaviors or thoughts inappropriate to the situation and leading to personal distress or the inability to achieve important goals. Other terms having essentially the same meaning include mental illness, mental disorder, and psychological disorder.

Psychosis

A disorder involving profound disturbances in perception, rational thinking or affect.

Schizophrenia

A psychotic disorder involving distortions in thoughts, perceptions, and/or emotions.

Seasonal Affective Disorders (SAD)

Technically seasonal pattern specifier, this DSM-IV course specifier for mood disorders is believed to be a form of depression caused by deprivation of sunlight. The term "course specifier" is used to describe how a disorder progresses.

Social -Cognitive - Behavioral Approach

A psychological alternative to the medical model that views psychological disorder through a combination of the social, cognitive and behavioral perspectives.

Somatoform Disorders

Psychological problems appearing in the form of bodily symptoms or physical complaints, such as weakness or excessive worry about disease. The ___ ___ include conversion disorder and hypochondriasis.