Psychopathology terms

Anxiety: a complex state of psychological distress that reflects emotional, behavioral, physiological, and cognitive reactions to threatening stimuli.

Maladaptive anxiety: intense and out of proportion to the threat that triggered the anxiety response. Tends to be chronic. Interferes with people’s ability to perform daily tasks.

Separation anxiety disorder (SAD): show excessive anxiety about leaving caregivers and other individuals to whom they are emotionally attached to.

Selective mutism: an anxiety disorder in which children consistently fail to speak in social situations where speaking is expected. Typically shown by preschoolers or young school age children.

Behavioral inhibition: the tendency to inhibit play and vocalization, to withdraw, and to seek a caregiver when encountering unfamiliar people or situations.

Mower’s two factor theory of anxiety: used to explain the cause and maintenance of selective mutism in children. According to this theory, selective mutism arises because of classical conditioning, when children associate speaking in certain situations with heightened arousal and psychological distress.

Specific Phobia: one of the most common, and most untreated, anxiety disorders in children and adolescents. Characterized by a marked fear of clearly discernible, circumscribed objects or situations.

Vasovagal response: a physiological reaction that involves a rapid increase and sudden decrease in blood pressure.

Social anxiety disorder: characterized by a marked and persistent fear of social or performance situations in which scrutiny or embarrassment might occur.

Panic disorder: a serious condition characterized by the presence of recurrent, unexpected panic attacks that cause significant distress or impairment.

Panic attack: an acute and intense episode of psychological distress and autonomic arousal.

Metacognition: the ability to think about their own thoughts and feelings.

Anxiety sensitivity: the tendency to perceive the symptoms of anxiety as extremely upsetting and aversive.

Expectancy theory of panic: people with high anxiety sensitivity are unusually sensitive to the physiological symptoms of anxious arousal.

Agoraphobia: characterized by recurrent anxiety about places or situations from which escape or help is not possible without considerable effort or embarrassment .

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): unlike other anxiety disorders in two respects. GAD is characterized by worry rather than fear or panic. people with GAD don’t fear specific objects, situations, or physical sensations, rather they worry about further misfortune. GAD is more closely associated withe depression than the other anxiety disorders. Children with GAD are at a particular risk for depression later in life, adolescents with GAD often have co-occuring problems with depressed mood and dysphoria.

Apprehensive expectation: excessive worry about the future. (hallmark of GAD).

Cognitive avoidance theory: worrying helps people avoid emotionally and physically distressing mental images. Worrying allows people to replace emotion-laden images of imminent danger with more abstract, analytical thoughts about future misfortune.

Obsessive-complusive disorder (OCD): characterized by the presence of recurrent, unwanted obsessions or compulsions that are extremely time consuming, cause marked distress or significantly impair daily functioning.

Obsessions: recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted.

Compulsions: repetitive behaviors or mental acts that an individual feels driven to perform in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly.

Cortico-basal-ganglionic circuit: seems to be particularly important to explain OC. This circuit forms a feedback loop, involving three brain regions, the orbitofrontal cortex, cingulate gyrus, and a portion of the basal ganglia called the caudate.

Pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with streptococcus (PANDAS) theory: a subset of children who show these infections develops a rapid-onset OCD symptoms and tics.

Tics: sudden, rapid nonrhythmic, and stereotyped behaviors that are involuntary. They can be either motoric (facial expressions, neck twitch, or limb movement) or vocal (a grunt, chirp, or clearing of the throat). Tics can also be simple or complex. Simple tics last a short duration and consist of one type of motor behavior, complex tics last several seconds usually consist of a combination of several simple tics.

Tourette’s disorder: defined by multiple motor and vocal tics lasting more than 1 year.

Trichotillomania: repeatedly pull out their hair, resulting in hair loss.

Excoriation disorder: new to DSM-5. Characterized by recurrent skin picking that results in lesions.

Exposure therapy: occurs when children confront these feared stimuli for discrete periods of time.

Contingency management: based on the principles of operant conditioning, it involves exposing the child to the feared stimulus and positively reinforcing the child contingent on the exposure.

Systematic desensitization: a technique based on the principle of classical conditioning. Children learn to associate a feared stimulus with a response that is incompatible with fear.

Modeling: a child watches an adult or another child confront the feared stimulus.

Relaxation training: the adolescent learns ways to reduce physiological arousal when he begins to experience panic. Relaxation training is designed to combat the adolescent’s anxiety sensitivity and tendency to overreact to stress.

Interoceptive exposure: a technique unique to the treatment of panic disorder. The adolescent learns to produce some of the physiological symptoms of panic and then use relaxation techniques to cope with these symptoms.

Cognitive restructuring: also used to treat panic disorder. Cognitive restructuring techniques generally involve challenging cognitive distortions that lead to panic attacks.

Exposure and response prevention: using information gathered during the interview, the child and clinician develop a hierarchy of stimuli that elicit obsessions. Over several weeks, the child exposes himself to each stimuli, gradually progressing up the hierarchy.

Self-monitoring: Children, with the help of parents, are asked to monitor and record frequency of tics during the course of the day.

Habit reversal training: involves teaching the child to engage in a behavior that makes it impossible to produce the tic.

Reactive attachment disorder (RAD): a rare condition seen almost exclusively in infants and young children who experience extreme deprivation. Youth with RAD show disturbed or developmentally inappropriate attachment behaviors, most children display attachment behaviors when they re scared, such as crying, clinging, and gesturing to be picked up. Children with RAD do not seek comfort from caregivers when distressed, and they do not respond effectively to comfort when it is provided, instead these children act inhibited and remain emotionally withdrawn from their caregivers.

Experience-expectant process: humans are biologically predisposed to form attachments and because attachment are evolutionarily adaptive, all infants who are exposed to a primary caregiver early in life will develop an attachment relationship with that caregiver, even if they are mistreated by caregiver.

Experience-dependent process: is unique to each caregiver-infant dyad and is based on the quality of their interactions over time.

Bucharest early intervention project (BEIP): a randomized controlled study designed to investigate the effects of early deprivation on children’s development and ways to mitigate these effects over time.

Disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED): show a pattern of culturally and developmentally inappropriate, overly familiar, behavior with strangers. Beginning at age 6 or 7 months, most children begin to show wariness of strangers. But children with DSED readily approach and interact with unfamiliar adults .

Social inhibition: controlling impulses in social situations.

Attachment and biobehavioral catch-up (ABC): intervention consists of ten 1 hour sessions for parent-child dyads. First goal is to cultivate nurturance, second goal is to improve synchrony (the nature of give-and-take of parent-child interactions), the final goal is to reduce intrusive or frightening behavior in parents.

Child physical abuse: nonacidental physical injury to a child, ranging from minor bruises to severe fractures or death.

child sexual abuse: any sexual act involving a child that is intended to provide sexual gratification to a parent, caregiver, or other individual who has responsibility for the child.

Child psychological abuse: non accidental verbal or symbolic acts by a child’s parent or caregiver that result in significant psychological harm to the child.

Sexualized behaviors: actions that are either not typical for the child’s age or inappropriate to the social situation.

Traumatic sexualization: the development of anxiety associated with one’s sexuality or difficulty establishing intimate and trusting relationships.

Parent-child cognitive-behavioral therapy (PC-CBT): is an evidence-based treatment program for caregivers who have engaged in physical maltreatment and their children.

Cognitive reconstructing: helps children identify and correct maladaptive thoughts about themselves, others, and the world.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): characterized by a set of behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and physiological symptoms that emerge following exposure to a life-threatening event.

Depersonalization: describes persistent or recurrent experiences of feeling detached from one’s own body or mental processes. People who experience episodes of depersonalization often feel like they are watching themselves in a movie to dream or are disconnected from their own thoughts and actions.

Derealization: involves persistent or recurrent thoughts or perceptions that one’s surroundings are not real. People who experience episodes of derealization see the world around them in an unusual or distorted manner.

Adverse childhood experience (ACE) study: the first major study to investigate the longe-term outcomes of youths exposed trauma. The study involved a large sample of adults , each adult completed a questionnaire about adverse experiences during childhood or adolescence,

Cognitive appraisal theory: asserts that the way people think about and evaluate stressful situations affects their subsequent feelings.

Problem-focused coping: usually considered more adaptive, it involves modifying or eliminating the conditions that gave rise to the physiological stressor or changing the perception of an experience in a. way that reduces or neutralizes the problem.

Escape or avoidance coping: involves disengaging from a stressful situation and it’s behavioral, cognitive, and emotional consequences.

Emotional processing theory: offers and explanation for many of the cognitive and emotional symptoms of PTSD. According to this theory, emotions are organized in our memory as cognitive structures or networks.

Sympathetic-adrenal-medullary (SAM) axis: regulates the body’s immediate fight-or-flight response.

Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis: regulates the body’s more delayed response to stress. The axis consist of 3 parts of the body, the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands.

Trauma-informed care: an overarching approach to treating youths and families exposed to life-threatening or traumatic events.

Psychological first aid (PEA): an evidence-based intervention designed to prevent PTSD and other psychological problems in youths exposed to catastrophic events. PFA is typically, administrated by first responders or mental health professionals.

Prolonged exposure therapy: an evidence-based treatment for older children and adolescents with PTSD, it’s based on emotional processing theory.

Trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT): an evidence-based treatment for youths exposed to trauma. It blends cognitive-behavioral interventions with elements of attachment theory, person-centered therapy, and family therapy.

Disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD): a depressive disorder characterized by persistence irritability and recurrent temper outbursts.

Comprehensive family therapy: program for youths with DMDD and their parents. Their treatment includes education about DMDD, traditional parent training, and cognitive-behavioral interventions to help children regulate their emotions.

Interpretation bias training: involves presenting children with a series of faces on a computer screen that fall on a continuum from ambiguously “happy” to ambiguously “angry”, and children were to correctly identify the face with the emotion.

Persistent depressive disorder: defined by the presence of chronically depressed mood, occurring most days for at least 2 years. In children and adolescents, it is characterized by chronically depressed or irritable mood that lasts at least 1 year. The disorder is often call dysthymia from the greek meaning “bad mood”.

Kindling hypothesis: explains the tendency of depressed individuals to have more depressive episodes in the future. According to this hypothesis, early depressive episodes sensitize individuals to stressful life events and feelings of dysphoria.

Monoamine hypothesis: depression asserts that three neurotransmitters with a similar chemical structure play a role in depressive disorders, serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.

Response-contingent positive reinforcement: actions are not rewarded, so their frequency decreases over time. A lack of positive reinforcement extinguishes adaptive behaviors, like helping around the house.

Automatic thoughts: are transient cognitions or mental images that pop into our minds when negative events occur.

Cognitive bias: occurs when we attend to only the negative aspects of an event and ignore or minimize the positive.

Cognitive distortion: occurs when we twist events to make them more problematic than they really are.

Collaborative empiricism: occurs when the therapist and client work together to test hypotheses based on observational data.

Socratic questioning: occurs when the therapist challenges the client’s beliefs by asking questions to draw out information from the client.

SMART goals: objectives that are specifically stated, measurable, appealing, realistic, and timed.

Interpersonal inventory: and exploration of significant relationships in the adolescent’s life. The purpose of the interpersonal inventory is to assess the number and quality of these relationships, changes enthuse relationships over time, and which relationships most strongly affect the adolescents mood.