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