Chapter 12: Abnormal Psychology

Psychological Disorder: Condition characterized by abnormal thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Psychopathology: Study of psychological disorders (etiology, manifestation, and treatment)

Criteria for defining a psychological disorder:

  • Significant disturbances in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
  • Disturbances reflect biological, psychological, or developmental dysfunction
  • Disturbances lead to significant distress or disability in one’s life
  • Disturbances do not reflect expected or culturally approved responses to certain events

Disordered: When disturbing to self/others, suggest dysfunction in normal mental functioning, and associated with significant distress/disability in social/job activities

Each entry in DSM=5=TR includes:

  • an overview of the disorder
  • specific symptoms required for diagnosis
  • prevalence information
  • risk factors associated with the disorder
  • comorbidity: the co-occurrence of two disorders

International Classification of Diseases (ICD): authoritative index of mental and physical diseases

  • used for clinical diagnosis
  • DSM more valued for researchers

Biological Perspectives: Psychological Disorders as linked to genetic factors, chemical imbalances, and brain abnormalities

Psychosocial perspective: emphasizes the importance of learning, stress, faulty, and self-defeating thinking patterns and environmental factors

Diathesis-stress model: People with an underlying predisposition/vulnerability for a disorder are more likely than others to develop a disorder when faced with adverse environmental or psychological events

  • Diathesis: bio or psychological
  • Event: Childhood maltreatment, negative life events, etc

Anxiety Disorders:

  • Characterized by excessive and persistent fear and anxiety that interfere with normal functioning (disruptive)
    • Fear: instantaneous reaction to imminent threat
    • Anxiety: Apprehension, avoidance, caution regarding a potential threat or negative event
  • Specificphobia: excessive, distressing, persistent fear or anxiety about a specific object or situation; disruptive to person’s life
    • acrophobia: heights
    • aerophobia: flying
    • arachnophobia: spiders
    • claustrophobia: enclosed spaces
    • cynophobia: dogs
    • hematophobia: blood
    • cphidiophobia: snakes
    • taphophobia: being buried alive
    • tryanophobia: injections
    • xenophobia: strangers
  • Phobias are acquired via 3 major learning pathways
    • Classical conditioning
    • Modeling (vicarious learning)
    • Verbal transmission
  • Social Anxiety Disorder: Extreme and persistent fear or anxiety and avoidance of social situations in which the person could potentially be negatively evaluated by others
    • Act in an embarrassing way: foolish, showing signs of anxiety → rejection
    • Safety behaviors: acts that reduce anxiety in social situation by reducing chance of negative outcomes
    • Resort to self-mediciation
    • Can develop through conditioning
    • Risk factor is behavioral inhibition - consistent tendency to show fear/restraint with unfamiliars
  • Panic disorder: Overwhelmed by panic with no apparent reason to be frightened
    • Etiology unclear
    • Heritability: exact genes unknown
    • Conditioning theories: classical conditioning responses to body sensations resembling anxiety or frightened
    • Cognitive theories: Psychologically diseases are prone to interpret ordinary body sensations catastrophically → interpretation creates anxiety/fear → additional symptoms → panic attack
  • Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Characterized by a continuous state of excessive, uncontrollable, and pointless worry and apprehension
    • Worry about routine
    • More days than not for 6 months
  • Agoraphobia: Intense fear/avoid situations where it is difficult to escape if one experiences symptoms of a panic attack

Obsessive-Compulsive disorder:

  • Experience thoughts and urges that are instructive and unwanted (obsessions) and/or the need to engage in repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions)
  • Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Preoccupied with a perceived flaw in their physical appearance that is either nonexistent or barely noticeable to other people
    • Avoiding letting people see perceived flaws
  • Hoarding disorder: Persist difficultly in parting with personal possessions, regardless of how valueless or useless these possessions are
  • Causes of OCD: genetic
  • Orbitofrontal cortex: an area of the frontal lobe involved in learning and decision-making
    • Orbitofrontal cortex: part of series of brain regions that are called the OCD circuit
    • OCD circuit: consists of several interconnected regions that influence the perceived emotional value of stimuli and the selection of both behavioral and cognitive responses
    • People with OCD shower higher degree of connectivity of the orbitofrontal cortex and other regions of the OCD circuit

Posttraumatic stress disorder:

  • part of Trauma-and-Stressor Related Disorders
  • Extremely stressful or traumatic events place people who experience them at an increased risk for developing psychological disorders
  • flashbacks: intrusive and distressing memories of the event (few seconds to several days in which individual relives the event and behaves as if the event were occurring at that moment)
  • Example of traumas can include ones that you have witnessed (don’t need to actually experience it)
  • Experience symptoms for more than 1 month
  • Risk factors: trauma experience, trauma severity, immediate social support, high neuroticism, low intelligence, female, low social economic status
  • PTSD Learning models: some symptoms developed/maintained through classical conditioning
    • Unconditioned stimulus is the traumatic event
    • Conditioned stimulus: cognitive, physical, and environmental cues that accompany it
    • Unconditioned Response: fear/anxiety
    • Conditioned Response: fear/anxiety

Mood disorders:

Mood disorders: Characterized by severe disturbances in mood and emotions (most often depression, but also mania and elation that distort outlook on life)

  • Depressive disorders: Disorders in which depression is the main feature
    • Depression: Intense and persistent sadness
  • Bipolar and related: Mania is the defining feature
    • Mania: state of extreme elation and agitation

Major Depressive Disorder: Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day, loss of interest and pleasure in usual activities

  • Suicidal ideation: Thoughts of death (not just fear of fear of dying), thinking about or planning suicide, or making an actual suicide attempt
  • Episodic (symptoms are typically present at their full magnitude for a certain period of time and then gradually abate)
  • 5 symptoms for at least 2-week period that cause significant distress or impair normal function
    • significant weight loss/gain and/or change in appetite
    • difficulty in falling asleep
    • fatigue
    • feelings of worthlessness or guilt
    • difficulty concentrating and indecisiveness
  • Loss of happiness in things you before found joyful or fufilling

Subsets of depression

  • Seasonal pattern: applies to situations in which a person experiences the symptoms of major depressive disorder only during a particular time of year
  • Peripartum onset (postpartum depression): applies to women who experience major depression during pregnancy or in the days following birth of their child
  • Persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia): experience depressed moods most of the day nearly every day for at least two years, don’t meet criteria for major depressive disorder

Bipolar disorder: Mood states that vacillate between depression and mania

  • Manic episode: distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood
    • Ex: striking it out because you feel you will be rich, loosing all your money in the process
  • flight of ideas: abruptly switching from one topic to another
  • Rapid-cycling subtype: at least 4 manic episodes (or combo of 4 manic and depressive) within one year

Mood disorders medication boost serotonin and neorepinephrine in medication

Bipolar disorder medication blocks norepinephrine and serotonin activity at the synapses using lithium

Depression: linked to elevated amygdala activity, less activation in the left prefrontal cortex, elevated cortisol levels

cortisol: stress hormone released during stress

Diathesis-stress: certain predispositions or vulnerability factors influence one’s reaction to stress

hopeless theory: the particular style of negative thinking leads to a sense of hopelessness, which then leads to depression

Suicide: Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with any intent to die

Schizophrenia:

  • Severe disorder, major disturbances in thought, emotion, behavior, perception → not function normally in life
  • Symptoms:
    • Hallucinations and delusions
    • Thinking: incoherent and disorganized
    • Difficulty regulating emotions/behavior
    • Behavior: bizarre
    • Emotions: flat
    • Motivation to engage in basic life activities in lacking
  • Hallucination: Perceptual experience that occurs in the absence of external stimulation
    • Auditory - hearing voices
    • Visual - seeing things that are not there
    • Olfactory - smelling odors not actually present
  • Delusions: beliefs that are contrary to reality, firmly held in face of contradictory evidence
    • Paranoid: false belief that others are plotting to harm
    • Grandiose: belief that one holds special power, unique knowledge
    • Somatic: belief that something highly abnormal is happening to the body
  • Disjointed and incoherent thought processes
  • Illogical remarks
  • Tangentiality: respond to others’ questions by remarks that are barely related
  • Positive behaviors: something think/do (hallucinations, delusions, etc)
  • Negative behaviors: decreases and absences in certain behaviors, emotions, drives
    • Flat affect: no emotion in facial expression, speech, movement
    • Abolition: lack of motivation to engage in meaningful activity
    • Asocility: social withdrawal
    • Anhedonia: inability to experience pleasure
  • Strong genetic component
  • Risk increases as genetic relatedness to family members diagnosed increases

Borderline personality disorder: Instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image, and mood, and impulsive

Antisocial personality disorder: No regard at all for other people’s rights or feelings

ADHD: Constant pattern of inattention and/or hyperactive and impulsive behavior that interferes with normal functioning

Autism: deficits in social interaction, deficits in communication, and repetitive patterns of behavior or in interests

Personality disorders: Exhibit a personality style that differs markedly from the expectations of their culture, is pervasive and flexible

  • Cluster A (odd or eccentric): paranoid personality disorder, schizoid, personality disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder
  • Cluster B (impulsive, overly dramatic, highly emotional): antisocial personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality
  • Cluster C (nervous and fearful): avoidant personality disorder, dependent personality disorder