Health and Abnormal Psychology

Seyle’s General Adaptation Syndrome

three repsonses to stress

  1. alarm

  2. resistance - try to adapt

  3. exhaustion - burnout after too much stress

Schools/Perspective

psychoanalytic/dynamic - pyscho = freud, internal unconscious drive

humanistic - failure to strive to one’s potential or being out of touch with one’s feelings

behavioral - reinforcement history, the environment

cognitive - irrational, dysfunctional thoughts, or ways of thinking

sociocultural - dysfunctional society

biomedical/neuroscience/evolutionary - genetics, biochemical imbalance

Happiness is not as much related to:

  • age

  • gender

  • parenthood

  • education

  • physical attractiveness

Hypochondriasis

  • complaints for medical doctors, but “all in their head”

  • overbelieve that minor headaches mean something more

Dissociative disorders

  • psychogenic amnesia - cannot remember

  • dissociative fugue - people with psychogenic find themselves in unfamiliar environment

Inappropriate Emotions and Actions

  • flat effect - diminished emotion

  • laughing at the wrong time

  • Avolition - lack of motivation/inability to initiate goal-directed behaviors

Types of Schizophrenia (around 25-26 age of onset)

  • acute

  • chronic

  • disorganized - disorganized speech or behavior, or flat or inappropriate emotion

  • paranoid - delusion/hallucination, someone out to get me (delusion of persecution)

  • catatonic - flat affect, waxy flexibility, parroting speech

Treatment

  • Rosenhan study - pretended to be schizophrenic and were admitted to an asylum even after acting normally while in there

  • ECT - for severe depression, side effect: memory loss

  • talk therapy - psychoanalytic, underlying/repressed memories to understand why

Drugs

  • antianxiety drugs - increase GABA

  • antidepressant drugs - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors

  • antipsychotic drugs - block dopamine receptors