Chapter 2- Neurobiological Perspective on Psychopathology Flashcards
What are neurotransmitters and what’s the connection to psychoactive drugs?
4pts
- Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers
- Psychoactive drugs act through neurotransmitter pathways
- Some drugs act as:
Agonists: activate receptor
Antagonist: block receptor
- First to be discovered
- Present throughout nervous system
- Motor neurons and muscles, attention, arousal, memory
What neurotransmitter is this and what mental disorder is in implicated in?
2pts
- Acetylcholine (Ach)
- Drugs treating Alzheimer’s- slow the reuptake of AcH
- Reward, pleasure, movement, learning, attention
- Some antipsychotic medication, recreational drugs
What monoamine neurotransmitter is this?
Dopamine
- Fight or flight response, alertness, decisions, hormones
What monoamine neurotransmitter is this?
Epinephrine and norepinephrine
- Behavioral and emotional regulation
- Sleep regulation
- Memory
- Arousal
- Attention
- 80% in GI tract
What monoamine neurotransmitter is this?
Seratonin
What is GABA?
4pts
- Primary inhibitory neurotransmitter
- Regulation of anxiety, sleep and arousal
BLANK is used to alleviate feelings of anxiety, stress, and fear and also used in decrease in the activity in the brain that causes seizures
GABA
What is glutamate?
3pts
- Primary excitatory neurotransmitter
- Learning, memory, mood
- Important for neuronal differentiation- which neurons are specialized for specific brain functions
What type of disturbance is at the core of most disorders?
Emotional disturbances
What are some key structures in the neural system for emotion and feeling?
7pts
- brainstem
- Hypothalamic nuclei
- Amygdala
- Insula cortex
- Anterior cingulate cortex
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex
- Somatosensory cortices
Neural systems for emotion and feeling- What is the function of the right hemisphere structures?
2pts
- Most important for emotional processing
- Some evidence that right hemisphere activation correlates with fear and sadness driven behaviors, whereas left hemisphere correlates with approach behaviors
Neural systems for emotion and feeling- What is the function of the amygdala?
4pts
- Most important structure in the neuroanatomy of emotion
- Important for social behaviors
- Recognition of emotions
- Threat processing
Neural systems for emotion and feeling- What is the function of the Ventromedial prefrontal cortex? What happens if it’s damaged?
2pts
- Critical role in higher order emotional processing
- Damage is linked to poor judgement, decision making, impaired emotions and feelings
Damage to this area causes impaired emotion recognition and emotional facial processing.
What structure is this?
Basal ganglia
What is heritability/heritability co-efficient?
Proportion of observed variance in group of individuals that can be explained or accounted for by genetic variance
What is the DSM and what is ICD?
- Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders (DSM)
- International Classification of Diseases (ICD)
- Uses categorical representations to define psychopathology
- “All or nothing” principle, where individuals must have a certain threshold of clinical criteria to reach diagnosis
What are two criticisms with the DSM and ICD use of categorical representations?
2pts
- High comorbidity- two diseases at once
- Heterogeneity- multiple presentations of the same disorder/different causes leads to the same disorder
