Classification, Diagnosis, and Anxiety Disorders Review Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering the history of psychiatric classification, models of behavior disorders, and the diagnostic features and etiology of anxiety disorders.

Syndrome

A constellation of observable signs and patient-reported symptoms occurring together that characterize a particular condition without necessarily being tied to a single known pathogenesis.

Essentialism

The philosophical belief that entities possess an inherent set of defining characteristics that make them what they are prior to existence, which science and philosophy aim to discover.

Supernatural Model

An etiological perspective attributing abnormal behavior to possession by demons, witchcraft, planetary gravitation, or sin, historically treated using trephining, rituals, and punishment.

Trephining

An ancient procedure associated with supernatural models of psychopathology that involved drilling or cutting holes into a person's skull to release evil spirits.

Moral Model

An $18\text{th}$ and $19\text{th}$ century view holding that abnormal behavior is deliberately adopted by an individual akin to criminal behavior, resulting in social stigma, family concealment, or confinement.

Factitious Disorder

A mental disorder in which a person repeatedly and deliberately feigns or induces physical or psychological symptoms without external incentives, such as Munchausen Disorder by Proxy.

Malingering

The deliberate fabrication or exaggeration of physical or psychological symptoms motivated by clear external incentives or secondary gains.

Phrenology

An early biological theory postulating that personality predispositions and behaviors are directly correlated with the physical shape and contours of an individual's skull.

Galen's Four Humors

An early biological theory asserting that physical health and temperament are determined by the relative proportions of four bodily fluids, treated primarily through dietary adjustments.

Psychosis

A severe mental disorder category characterized by a fundamental loss of contact with reality, often involving hallucinations, delusions, or severe impairment in reality testing.

Neurosis

A milder classification of mental disorder characterized by subjective distress and distortions of reality without a complete break from reality.

Dementia Paralytica

A neurodegenerative disease in which Hideyo Noguchi and Joseph Moore isolated the syphilitic bacterium in $1913$, marking the first mental disorder with a confirmed biological origin.

Alienists

An early historical designation for psychiatrists who specialized in treating severe mental illnesses within asylum settings.

Neo-Kraepelinians

A group of psychiatrists in the late $1970\text{s}$ led by figures like Gerald Klerman who sought to realign psychiatry with medicine by emphasizing discrete mental illnesses, diagnostic classification, and biological origins.

DSM-III

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual edition published in $1980$ that introduced explicit diagnostic criteria, an etiology-atheoretical approach, $17$ major diagnostic categories, and a multiaxial system.

Harmful Dysfunction Model

Jerome Wakefield's definition of mental disorder requiring both a factual component (failure of an evolutionarily designed internal mechanism) and a value component (socially judged harm).

Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)

An NIMH research framework for studying psychopathology by integrating levels of information from genomics to self-report across five core domains: Negative Valence, Positive Valence, Cognitive, Social, and Arousal/Regulatory.

Drapetomania

A conjectural mental illness proposed in $1851$ by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright that pathologized Black slaves who sought to escape captivity.

Neurodiversity

A framework conceptualized by Judy Singer asserting that brain variations in learning, attention, mood, and sociability represent normal human neurological differences rather than pathological deficits.

Inappropriate Stimulus Control

An essentialist characteristic of behavior disorders described by Goldfried and Davison involving intense emotional responses triggered by objectively harmless or innocuous environmental cues.

Experiential Avoidance

The psychological process of engaging in active efforts to escape, suppress, or alter unpleasant internal experiences, including negative emotions, distressing thoughts, and bodily sensations.

Delay Discounting

The tendency to undervalue future long-term benefits or ignore long-term costs in order to achieve smaller immediate rewards or short-term relief from distress.

Vicious Cycle Behavior

A concept formulated by Paul Wachtel in which the defensive strategies an individual uses to avoid emotional pain or rejection directly maintain and perpetuate their suffering.

Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS)

A stimulus that inherently and automatically elicits an unconditioned reflexive response without requiring any prior exposure or learning history.

Conditioned Stimulus (CS)

An initially neutral stimulus that comes to trigger a reflexive conditioned response after being repeatedly paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

Mowrer's Two-Factor Theory

A learning model postulating that fear is initially acquired via classical conditioning (Factor 1) and subsequently maintained through operant reinforcement when avoidance behaviors produce relief (Factor 2).

Neurotic Paradox

The clinical observation that individuals with anxiety disorders generally recognize their fear and avoidance behaviors as irrational, yet continue to engage in them.

Lumping vs. Splitting

The conceptual debate in anxiety classification between treating all anxiety disorders as manifestations of one underlying core process (lumping) versus dividing them into distinct categories based on descriptive topographies (splitting).

Predatory Imminence Continuum

Michael Fanselow's model describing how defensive responses shift based on threat proximity, moving from pre-encounter vigilance to post-encounter freezing and circa-strike explosive defense.

Preparedness Theory

Martin Seligman's evolutionary hypothesis holding that humans are biologically predisposed to rapidly acquire and resist extinction of fears toward stimuli that posed ancestral threats.

Specific Phobia

An anxiety disorder defined by marked, out-of-proportion fear and avoidance triggered by the presence or anticipation of a specific object or situational context.

Panic Attack

An abrupt surge of intense fear or physical discomfort that reaches a peak within minutes, involving at least $4$ of $13$ physical and cognitive symptoms.

Panic Disorder

An anxiety disorder characterized by recurrent, unexpected panic attacks followed by at least $1\,\text{month}$ of persistent concern about additional attacks, their consequences, or related behavioral changes.

Interoceptive Conditioning

A classical conditioning process where low-level internal physiological sensations become conditioned stimuli that trigger heightened anxiety and full panic attacks, often referred to as 'fear of fear.'

Barlow's Alarm Theory

An etiological model proposing that panic attacks acting as false alarms (where the threat source is unidentified) significantly increase the likelihood of recurrent panic attacks compared to true alarms.

Agoraphobia

An anxiety disorder involving intense fear and avoidance of $2$ or more situational contexts where escape might be difficult or help unavailable in the event of panic or incapacitating symptoms.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

An anxiety disorder characterized by chronic, excessive, and uncontrollable worry across multiple domains occurring more days than not for at least $6\,\text{months}$, accompanied by physical/cognitive symptoms.