Abnormal Psychology

Abnormal Psychology

Defining Abnormal

• Abnormal psychology is the study of people who suffer from psychological disorders.
• It includes the study of:
  • Depression
  • Substance abuse
  • Learning difficulties
  • Mental disorders
• Defining abnormality:
  • Maladaptive/disturbing behavior to the individual.
  • Disturbing behavior to others.
  • Behavior not shared by many members of society.
  • Irrational behavior that does not make sense to the average person.

Insanity

• Insanity is a legal term, not a psychological one.
• If found insane, a person cannot be fully responsible for their actions due to a psychological disorder impairing their judgement.

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)

• Psychologists use the DSM to diagnose patients.
• It is revised periodically; currently in its 5th edition.
• Disorders are reclassified, such as homosexuality in previous editions, which was once classified as a sexual deviation.

Psychological Perspectives

• Different psychological perspectives provide different explanations for the etiology/cause of disorders:
  • Psychoanalytic/dynamic: Internal, unconscious drives.
  • Humanistic: Failure to strive for one's potential or being out of touch with one's feelings.
  • Behavioral: Reinforcement history, environment.
  • Cognitive: Irrational, dysfunctional thoughts or ways of thinking.
  • Biomedical/Neuroscience: Organic problems, biomedical imbalances, genetic predispositions.

Anxiety Disorders

• Phobia: Intense unwarranted fear of a situation or object.
  • Examples: claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces), arachnophobia (fear of spiders).
  • Agoraphobia: Fear of open, public spaces; extreme cases may prevent individuals from leaving their homes.
  • Social anxiety disorder: Fear of situations in which one could embarrass oneself in public (e.g., eating, walking).
  • Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD): Constant, low-level anxiety.
  • Panic disorder: Acute episodes of intense anxiety without justifiable cause.
• Theorist Explanations:
  • Psychoanalytic: Result of conflicts among the id, ego, and superego.
  • Behaviorists: Arise out of reinforcement
  • Cognitive: Results from dysfunctional ways of thinking; unrealistic expectations.

Somatoform Disorders

• Occur when a person manifests psychological problems through physiological symptoms.
  • Conversion disorder: Reporting severe physical problems (e.g., paralysis, blindness) without biological explanation.
  • Hypochondriasis: Complaining frequently about physical problems without a medical cause.
    • Individuals are known as hypochondriacs.

Dissociative Disorders

• Involve a disruption in conscious processes.
  • Dissociative amnesia: Inability to recall information or memories without a physiological basis.
  • Dissociative fugue: Reversible amnesia for personal identity, including memories and personality.
    • Involves unplanned travel or wandering, sometimes with the establishment of a new identity.
  • Dissociative identity disorder: Formerly called multiple personality disorder, a person has several personalities rather than one integrated personality.
• Psychoanalytic explanation: results from extremely traumatic events being thoroughly repressed.
• Critics of dissociative identity disorder judge it as role-play.

Mood or Affective Disorders

• Characterized by extreme or inappropriate emotions.
  • Major depressive disorder (unipolar depression): Remaining depressed or unhappy, in the absence of a clear reason, for as little as two weeks.
    • May result in loss of appetite, fatigue, changes in sleep patterns, lack of interest in normally enjoyable activities, and feelings of worthlessness.
  • Seasonal affective disorder (SAD): Depression during certain times of the year, usually winter, with less sunlight.
• Theorist Explanations:
  • Psychoanalysts: Anger directed inward, loss during early psychosexual stages, or an overly punitive superego.
  • Cognitive (Aaron Beck): Unreasonably negative ideas about oneself, the world, and the future (Cognitive Triad).

Attributional Style

• Also known as explanatory style, describes how people tend to explain life events to themselves.
• Involves three factors:
  • Internal vs. External: Whether the cause of the event is seen as internal or external.
  • Stable vs. Unstable: Whether the situation is seen as stable or unstable.
  • Global vs. Specific: Whether the event has a global effect on their lives or if it's specific.
• People who make internal, global, and stable attributions for bad events are more likely to be depressed.
• Martin Seligman and Learned Helplessness
• Biological explanations:
  • Low levels of serotonin are linked to major depressive disorder.
  • Depression has a genetic component.

Bipolar Disorder

• Formerly known as manic depression, involves both depressed and manic states.
  • Manic state: Feelings of lots of energy, confidence, power, and sometimes anxiousness and irritability.
  • Often followed by depression.
  • Risky and poorly thought-out behavior: gambling, criminal behavior, irresponsible sexual behavior.

Schizophrenia

• Distorted thinking, delusions, hallucinations, disorganized language, and unusual motor behavior (movement).

  • Symptoms:
    • Delusions: Beliefs that have no basis in reality.
      • Delusions of persecution: Belief that people are out to get you.
      • Delusions of grandeur: Belief that you enjoy greater power and influence than you actually do.
    • Hallucinations: Perceptions in the absence of any sensory stimulation.
    • Neologisms: Made up words.
    • Clang associations: String together nonsense words that rhyme.
    • Flat affect: No emotional response.
    • Catatonia: Remaining motionless in strange positions for hours at a time.
    • Waxy flexibility: Allowing the body to be moved into any alternative shape and holding that new pose.
    • Positive symptoms: excesses in behavior, thought, or mood such as neologisms and hallucinations.
    • Negative symptoms: are flat affect (no emotional response) and catatonia.

• Dopamine hypothesis: High levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia.

  • Antipsychotic drugs lower dopamine levels.
  • Too much of these results in muscle tremors and stiffness called tardive dyskinesia.

• Biological Explanations - The Brain

  • Schizophrenia patients may exhibit morphological changes in the brain like enlargement of fluid-filled ventricles (15% larger).

• Risk of developing schizophrenia

  • General population $1\%$
  • First cousins /3rd degree relatives $2\%$
  • Uncles/Aunts /Nephews / Nieces $4\%$
  • Grandchildren /Half siblings /Parents $6\%$
  • Siblings $9\%$
  • Children $13\%$
  • Fraternal twins $17\%$
  • Identical twins $48\%$

• Negative symptoms are linked to genetic factors, whereas positive symptoms tend to be related to abnormalities in dopamine levels.

• Environmental Stressors & Schizophrenia:

  • A double bind is when a person is given contradictory messages.
  • Environmental stressors can provide the circumstances under which a biological predisposition for illness, like schizophrenia, can express itself.
  • Diathesis-stress model: Identical twins do not always both suffer from schizophrenia because schizophrenia may result from an environmental factor that is not in the other’s environment.

Personality Disorders

• Well-established, maladaptive ways of behaving that negatively affect one’s ability to function.
  • Antisocial personality disorder: Little to no regard for others’ feelings; criminals have a high incidence.
  • Dependent personality disorder: People who rely too much on others.
  • Paranoid personality disorder: Constantly feeling persecuted.
  • Narcissistic personality disorder: Seeing oneself as the center of the universe.
  • Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder: Persistent unwanted thoughts (obsessions) cause someone to feel the need (compulsion) to engage in an action.

Other Disorders

• Post-traumatic stress disorder: Flashbacks or nightmares following a person’s involvement in or observation of an extremely troubling event.

  • Psychosexual disorders: Sexual attraction to an object, person, or activity not usually seen as sexual.
    • Pedophilia: Attraction to children.
    • Zoophilia: Attraction to an animal other than a human.
    • Fetishism: Attraction to objects like shoes.

• Eating Disorders.

  • Anorexia: Significantly lower weight for one’s age and size, intense fear of food and fat, and distorted body image.
  • Bulimia: Commonly involves binge-purge cycles.
  • Substance related and addictive disorders: Diagnosis made when the use of such substances or behaviors like gambling or drugs negatively affect one’s life.

• Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Developmental problems; difficulty paying attention or sitting still; more common in boys.

  • Critics suggest it is over diagnosed.

• Alzheimer’s disease: A form of dementia; deterioration of cognitive abilities, often most dramatically in memory; progressive; associated with beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.

The Rosenhan Study

• The Influence of a Label
• Considered an important and influential criticism of psychiatric diagnosis.