Addiction, OCD and Eating disorders Flashcards
What effects do alcohol and nicotine have?
Relieve stress and tension
What is the effect of addiction?
Addictions have a powerful unconscious component mediated by the substances’ direct action on neural circuits for motivation and reward seeking
What is central to the development of addiction?
Repetitive negative reinforcement in the context of persistent states of suffering/ distress/ tension
What does OCD stand for?
Obsessive compulsive disorder
What does obsessive mean?
Thinking about something all the time but you don’t want to
Intrusive thoughts
What is OCD characterised by?
Intrusive thoughts/ images and compulsive behaviour
These thoughts are distressing and involuntary
Negative reinforcement is driven by the distress caused by the intrusive thoughts and cemented by habit- formation
What is compulsive behaviour?
Behavior serves to relieve the state of anxiety/ tension
Obsessions drive the compulsions
What causes an eating disorder?
Stigma:
Healthy food = good
Loosing weight = success and self- restraint
Your body become the focus of low self-worth and anxiety
What action do individuals take because of their anxiety projected onto their body?
Diet restriction
Eating high calorific food
How can diet restriction be linked to negative reinforcement ?
When an individual eats they feel failure, loose control and binge sometimes
Feeling of failure may lead to intense distress which may cause them to purge
Purging may give them temporary relief (negative reinforcement) which leads to a cycle and compulsion
How can a diet restriction be linked to cognitive inflexibility?
A diet may lead to safety, control and achievement
This can lead to weight loss which adds to your sense of achievement and leads to reinforcement and a cycle and cognitive inflexibility (can’t see other options)- reinforces compulsion
This makes you feel that eating is failure and is a loss of control
What is the result of eating high calorie food?
Gives a neural reward
Leads to temporary relief- negative reinforcement
Can become compulsive
What is anorexia?
Eating disorder where the thought of eating is terrifying
What is positive reinforcement?
Giving something to a subject when they perform the desired action so that they associate the action with the reward and do it more often
