Chapter 1 Flashcards
What is Abnormal Psychology?
- “abnormal psychology is the branch of the science psychology that addresses the description, causes and treatment of abnormal behavior patterns”
- branch of psychology that deal with the description, causes and treatment of abnormal behavior patterns
What is the medical model
biological perspective in which abnormal behavior is viewed as symptomatic of underlying illness
mental illness is ultimately a disease of the brain, and we should be researching it the same way as other diseases. Helped move away from thinking that mental illness derived from the supernatural
what are Hallucinations
perceptions that occur in the absence of an external stimulus and that are confused with reality
How do we define abnormal behavior?
- Is the behavior unusual? 2. Does the behavior violate social norms? 3. Does the behavior involve a faulty interpretation of reality? 4. Does the behavior cause personal distress? 5. Is the behavior maladaptive or self-defeating? 6. Is the behavior dangerous (to the person of others)?
What Factors Affect our Perception of What is Abnormal?
Culture?
- behavior consider normal in one culture may deemed abnormal in another. For example, anxiety and depression
- we need to consider how people in different cultures experience states of emotional distress, including depressions and anxiety, rather than imposing our perspectives on them
- even the way mental illness manifests are influenced by culture
What Factors Affect our Perception of What is Abnormal?
Context?
- Is this abnormal? (Shirt off at a hockey game)
- Does it deviate from social norms?
- that depends on where and when the behaviors occur
How Common are Psychological Disorders?
- Anxiety disorders: affects almost 30% of adults in their lifetime
- Mood disorders: affects over 20% of adults in their lifetime
- Substance abuse disorders affects almost 15% of adults across their lifetimes
- process addictions: gambling, excessive video games,
- Any disorder: affects over 46% of adults in their lifetime
What are the main risk factors for developing a psychological disorder?
- age
- education
- childhood trauma
- current stress
- life events
- lack of social support
- gender
- physical health
- genetic predisposition
-protective factor?
something that mitigates the risk or seriousness of the psychological risk factor
psychological disorder (mental disorder):
- involve abnormal behavior patterns associated with disturbances in mental health or psychological functioning
What are the risk factors for developing a psychological disorder?
- exposure to multiple risk factors can have an exponential effect that dramatically increases the likelihood of adverse outcomes
- exposure to just 2 factors can engender a fourfold increase in adverse outcomes
- exposure to 4 or more risk factors can increase adverse outcomes tenfold
How have we historically viewed abnormal behavior?
-medieval times (exorcism)
- Witchcraft
- Malleus Maleficarum – the hammer of witches, witch hunters
- not universally held
-The Demonological Model
-the model that explains abnormal behavior in terms of supernatural forces
Trephining ?
harsh prehistoric practice of cutting a hole in a person’s skull, possibly as an ancient form of surgery for brain trauma, or possibly as a means of releasing the demons prehistoric people may have believed caused abnormal behavior in the inflicted individual
-Hippocrates and ‘ill humors’
the humors?
- Hot and dry – yellow file; fire
- wet and cold – Phlegm; water
- hot and wet – blood; air
- Dry and cold – Black; bile earth
-phlegmatic
slow and stolid (phlegm)
- melancholia:
: state of severe depression (black bile)
sanguine:
cheerful (blood)
-choleric
having or showing a bad temper (yellow bile)
-Asylums in Europe and the New world (or madhouses)
Bedlam, London UK ?
first described as a hospital, eventually had some permanent patients, known for brutal treatment of patients
-Hotel Dieu (Quebec, 1639)
-referring to canals and disorganization and mistreatment, people were treated as animals and 2nd class citizens
- The Reform Movement: Moral Therapy
- Philippe Pinel (France), William Turke (England) and Dorthea Dix (Canada and the USA)
- people should start being treated humanely although mist people saw people with a mental illness as a threat to society at the time, not as sick people who needed care
- found that most people who were “chained” became calm and docile when treated with kindness and fairly
-moral therapy:
: a 19th century treatment philosophy empathizing that hospitalized mental patients should be treated with care and understating in a pleasant environment, not shackled in chains
-Deinstitutionalization:
-practice of discharging large numbers of hospitalized mental patients to the community and reducing the need for new admissions through the development of alternative treatment approaches such as halfway houses and crisis intervention services
-phenothiazines
: group of antipsychotic drugs or “major tranquilizers” used in the treatment of schizophrenia. Helped mange the population
-Largactil:
Largactil is used to treat several conditions and may be used either for a short time or for a long time. Largactil is used to treat various problems such as severe depression or behavioral disturbances. Largactil can also be used to treat nausea, vomiting, severe pain and unstoppable hiccups
-negative symptoms – inability to live independently, fears, paranoia and sometimes are never addressed. People can end up homeless not because of the active symptoms but because of the negative
Dementia praecox
term used by Emil to describe the disorder we now call schizophrenia
-general paresis:
degenerative brain disorder that occurs during the final stage of syphilis
-Psychological Models
only convinced there was a broad range of things, and manifested physically, but only interested in the psychological disorders, like conversion disorders: deafness, muteness, blindness, losing functions in the body.
-hysterical blindness is considered conversion disorders
-Thomas Szasz: The Myth of Mental Illness
- talks about how mental illness is a socially defined construct and doesn’t have a real objective meaning, some behaviors are unacceptable socially and those people are branded as something abnormal. Stigmatized and socially degraded
- once a person has been so branded as mentally ill, it is very difficult thing to establish their sanity, or it was back in the day
Biological Perspectives
-biological perspectives vs the medical model
- One can adapt a biologically orientated perspective without using the terminology of the medical model
- you don’t have to be a physician
- A focus on biological factors does not require the medical model
Genetics:
science of heredity
-polygenic
: traits or characteristics found in the nuclei of the cell that carry the units of heredity, or genes
-DNA:
deoxyribonucleic acid is a double strand complex molecule of helical structure that contains the genetic instructions for building and maintaining living organisms
-genotype
: the set of traits specified by genetic code
-phenotype:
representation of the total array of an organism, as influenced by the interaction of nature (genetic factors) and nurture (environmental factors)
-proteins:
organic compounds consisting of amino acids that perform most life functions and make up the majority of cellular structures
-Genome:
all the genetic material encoded in DNA
-we know that there are some traits that are correlated with DNA and genes
-DNA: the molecular structure of the genome comprised of 4 organic compounds
- A – adenine
- T – Thymine
- C – cytosine
- G – guanine
-Human Genome:
2.8 billion base pairs; 20-25 thousand genes. Comprises of all the genic material encoded in the DNA located in the nucleus of the cell in that organism
Epigenome:
: the sum of inherited and acquired molecular variations to the genome that lead to changes in gene regulation without changing the DNA sequence of the genome itself
– speculated in the 1940s, things that occur in their life and their mothers’ life can affect their genes, switch on or switch off certain genes. Study of heritable and acquirable changes gene regulation and expression
-heritability
is a ratio of genetic to phenotypic variance
-Soma
– cell body
-dendrites
root like structures at the end of a neuron that receive nerve impulses from other neurons
-axon
– long, thin part of a neuron along which nervous impulses travel
-terminals
– the small branching structures found at the tips of axons
-knobs
– swollen endings of axon terminals
neurotransmitters:
chemical substances that serve as a type of messenger by transmitting neural impulses from one neuron to another. Cause axons to conduct the messages in electrical form
-synapse
– junction between the terminal knob of one neuron and the dendrite or soma of another through which nerve impulses pass