What is Abnormality

14.1 Changing Conceptions of Abnormality

• Psychopathology: the study of abnormal behavior and psychological dysfunction

• Situational Context: the social or environmental setting of a person’s behavior

• Subjective Discomfort: Emotional distress or emotional pain

• Maladaptive: anything that doesn’t allow a person to function within or adapt to the stresses and everyday demands of life

• Psychological Disorder: any pattern of behavior or thinking that causes people significant distress, causes them to harm others, or harms their ability to function in daily life

14.2 Models of Abnormality

• Biological Model: model of explaining thinking or behavior as caused by biological changes in the chemical, structural, or genetic systems of the body

• Cognitive Psychologists: psychologists who study the way people think, remember, and mentally organize information

• Sociocultural Perspective: perspective that focuses on the relationship between social behavior and culture; in psychopathology, perspective in which abnormal thinking and behavior (as well as normal) is seen as the product of learning and shaping within the context of the family, the social group to which one belongs, and the culture within which the family and social group exist

• Cultural Relativity: the need to consider the unique characteristics of the culture in which behavior takes place

• Cultural Syndromes: sets of particular symptoms of distress found in particular cultures, which may or may not be recognized as an illness within the culture

• Biopsychological Model: perspective in which abnormal thinking or behavior is seen as the result of the combined and interacting forces of biological, psychological, social, and cultural influences

14.3 Diagnosing and Classifying Disorders

• DSM-5 is what they will use in the US

Disorders of Anxiety, Trauma, and Stress: What, Me Worry?

14.4 Anxiety Disorders

• Anxiety Disorders: class of disorders in which the primary symptom is excessive or unrealistic anxiety

• Free-Floating Anxiety: anxiety that is unrelated to any specific and known cause

• Phobia: an irrational, persistent fear of an object, situation, or social activity

• Social Anxiety Disorder (Social Phobia): fear of interacting with others or being in social situations that might lead to a negative evaluation

• Specific Phobia: fear of objects or specific situations or events

• Claustrophobia: fear of being in a small, enclosed space

• Acrophobia: fear of heights

• Agoraphobic: fear of being in a place or situation from which escape is difficult or impossible

• Panic Attack: sudden onset of intense panic in which multiple physical symptoms of stress occur, often with feelings that one is dying

• Panic Disorder: disorder in which panic attacks occur more than once or repeatedly, and cause persistent worry or changes in behavior

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder: disorder in which a person has feelings of dread and impending doom along with physical symptoms of stress, which lasts 6 months or more

14.5 Other Disorders Related to Anxiety

• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): disorder in which intruding, recurring thoughts or obsessions create anxiety that is relieved by performing a repetitive, ritualistic behavior or mental act (compulsion)

• Acute Stress Disorder (ASD): a disorder resulting from exposure to a major stressor, with symptoms of anxiety, dissociation, recurring nightmares, sleep disturbances, problems in concentration, and moments in which people seem to “relive” the event in dreams and flashbacks for as long as 1 month following the event

• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): a disorder resulting from exposure to a major stressor, with symptoms of anxiety, dissociation, nightmares, poor sleep, reliving the event, and concentration problems, lasting for more than 1 month

  • Symptoms may appear immediately, or not occur until 6 months or later after the traumatic event

14.6 Causes of Anxiety, Trauma, and Stress Disorders

• Magnification: the tendency to interpret situations as far more dangerous, harmful, or important than they actually are

• All-or-Nothing Thinking: the tendency to believe that one’s performance must be perfect or the result will be a total failure

• Overgeneralization: distortion of thinking in which a person draws sweeping conclusions based on only one incident or event and applies those conclusions to events that are unrelated to the original

  • The tendency to interpret a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat and failure

• Minimization: distortions of thinking in which a person blows a negative event out of proportion to its importance (magnification) while ignoring relevant positive events (minimization)

Dissociative Disorders: Altered Identities

14.7 Types of Dissociative Disorders

• Dissociative Disorders: disorders in which there is a break in conscious awareness, memory, the sense of identity, or some combination

• Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID): a disorder occurring when a person seems to have two or more distinct personalities within one body

14.8 Causes of Dissociative Disorders

• Can be defense mechanisms for all sorts of situations

Disorders of Mood: The Effect of Affect

14.9 Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Disorders

• Affect: in psychology, a term indicating “emotion” or “mood”

• Mood disorder: disorders in which mood is severely disturbed

• Major Depressive Disorder: severe depression that comes on suddenly and seems to have no external cause, or is too severe for current circumstances

• Manic: having the quality of excessive excitement, energy, and elation or irritability

• Bipolar Disorder: periods of mood that may range from normal to manic, with or without episodes of depression (bipolar I disorder), or spans of normal mood interspersed with episodes of major depression and episodes of hypomania (bipolar II disorder)

14.10 Causes of Disordered Mood

• Explanations of depression and other disorders of mood come from the perspectives of behavioral, social cognitive, and biological theories as well as genetics

Eating Disorders and Sexual Dysfunction

14.11 Eating Disorders

• Anorexia Nervosa (Anorexia): a condition in which a person reduces eating to the point that their body weight is significantly low, or less than minimally expected

  • In adults, this is likely associated with a BMI 18.5

• Bulimia Nervosa (Bulimia): a condition in which a person develops a cycle of “binging,” or overeating enormous amounts of food at one sitting, and then using unhealthy methods to avoid weight gain

• Binge-Eating Disorder: a condition in which a person overeats, or binges, on enormous amounts of food at one sitting, but unlike bulimia nervosa, the individual does not then purge or use other unhealthy methods to avoid weight gain

14.12 Sexual Dysfunctions and Problems

• Sexual Dysfunction: a problem in sexual functioning

Schizophrenia: Altered Reality

14.13 Symptoms of Schizophrenia

• Schizophrenia: severe disorder in which the person suffers from disordered thinking, bizarre behavior, hallucinations, and inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality

• Psychotic: refers to an individual’s inability to separate what is real and what is fantasy

• Delusions: false beliefs held by a person who refuses to accept evidence of their falseness

• Hallucinations: false sensory perceptions, such as hearing voices that do not really exist

• Flat affect: a lack of emotional responsiveness

• Catatonia: disturbed behavior ranging from statue-like immobility to bursts of energetic, frantic movement, and talking

• Positive Symptoms: symptoms of schizophrenia that are excesses of behavior or occur in addition to normal behavior; hallucinations, delusions, and distorted thinking

• Negative Symptoms: symptoms of schizophrenia that are less than normal behavior or an absence of normal behavior

  • Poor attention, flat affect, and poor speech production

14.14 Causes of Schizophrenia

• Stree-Vulnerability Model: explanation of disorder that assumes a biological sensitivity, or vulnerability, to a certain disorder will result in the development of that disorder under the right conditions of environmental or emotional stress

Personality Disorders: I’m Okay, It’s Everyone Else Who’s Weird

14.15 Categories of Personality Disorders

• Personality Disorders: disorders in which a person adopts a persistent, rigid, and maladaptive pattern of behavior that interferes with normal social interactions

• Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD): disorder in which a person uses other people without worrying about their rights or feelings and often behaves in an impulsive or reckless manner without regard for the consequences of that behavior

• Borderline Personality Disorder (BLPD): maladaptive personality pattern in which the person is moody, unstable, lacks a clear sense of identity and often clings to others with a pattern of self-destructiveness, chronic loneliness, and disruptive anger in close relationships

14.16 Causes of Personality Disorders

• Through different forms of learning and reinforcement, can be genetic,  ca be due to stress or coping