Chapter 14

Agoraphobia

A fear of going out to public places.

Anhedonia

A diminished ability to experience pleasure.

Anorexia nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by intense fear of gaining weight, disturbed body image, refusal to maintain normal weight, and use of dangerous measures to lose weight.

Anxiety disorders

A class of disorders marked by feelings of excessive apprehension and anxiety.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)

A psychological disorder characterized by profound impairment of social interaction and communication and severely restricted interests and activities.

Binge-eating disorder

An eating disorder that involves distress-inducing eating binges that are not accompanied by the purging, fasting, and excessive exercise seen in bulimia.

Bipolar disorder

Disorder typically marked by the experience of both depressed and manic periods.

Bulimia nervosa

An eating disorder characterized by habitually engaging in out-of-control overeating followed by unhealthy compensatory efforts, such as self-induced vomiting, fasting, abuse of laxatives and diuretics, and excessive exercise.

Concordance rate

A statistic that indicates the percentage of twin pairs or other pairs of relatives who exhibit the same disorder.

Delusions

False beliefs that are maintained even though they clearly are out of touch with reality.

Diagnosis

Distinguishing one illness from another.

Dissociative amnesia

A sudden loss of memory for important personal information that is too extensive to be due to normal forgetting.

Dissociative disorders

A class of disorders in which people lose contact with portions of their consciousness or memory, resulting in disruptions in their sense of identity.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID)

Dissociative disorder that involves the coexistence in one person of two or more largely complete, and usually very different, personalities.

Eating disorders

Severe disturbances in eating behavior characterized by preoccupation with weight and unhealthy efforts to control weight.

Etiology

The apparent causation and developmental history of an illness.

Generalized anxiety disorder

A disorder marked by a chronic high level of anxiety that is not tied to any specific threat.

Hallucinations

Sensory perceptions that occur in the absence of a real external stimulus or that represent gross distortions of perceptual input.

Major depressive disorder

Disorder characterized by persistent feelings of sadness and despair and a loss of interest in previous sources of pleasure.

Medical model

The idea that it is useful to think of abnormal behavior as a disease.

Neurotransmitters

Chemicals that carry signals from one neuron to another.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

Is marked by persistent, uncontrollable intrusions of unwanted thoughts (obsessions) or urges to engage in senseless rituals (compulsions).

Panic disorder

Recurrent attacks of overwhelming anxiety that usually occur suddenly and unexpectedly.

Prognosis

A forecast about the probable course of an illness.

Prolonged grief disorder

Intense and persistent grief over the death of a loved one that interferes with daily life more than a year after the loss.

Schizophrenia

A disorder marked by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and speech, and deterioration of adaptive behavior.

Specific phobia

A phobia marked by a persistent and irrational fear of an object or situation that presents no realistic danger.