Chapter 9 Flashcards
Psychological Disorders
Anxiety Disorders
A category of mental disorders characterized by persistent anxiety or fears.
Central Symptoms
Symptoms of mental disorders observable in practically all cultures.
Cultural Symptoms
Recurrent, locally specific patterns of aberrant behaviour and troubling experience that may or may not be linked to a particular DSM-V diagnostic category. Cultural syndromes are generally limited to specific societies or areas and indicate repetitive and troubling sets of experiences and observations.
Depressive Disorder
A category of psychological disorders characterized by a profound and persistent feeling of sadness or despair, guilt, loss of interest in things that were once pleasurable, and disturbance of sleep and appetite.
Melancholia
The most common label used in many countries in the past for symptoms known today as depression.
Peripheral Symptoms
Symptoms of mental disorders that are culture specific.
Personality Disorders
Enduring patterns of behaviour and inner experience that deviate markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture.
Relativist Perspective
Humans develop ideas, establish behavioural norms and learn emotional responses according to a set of cultural prescriptions. People from different cultural settings should therefore understand psychological disorders significantly different.
Schizophrenia
A disorder characterized by the presence of delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and disorganized or catatonic behaviour.
Tolerance Threshold
A measure of tolerance or intolerance toward specific personality traits in a specific cultural environment.
Universalist Perspective
People, despite cultural differences, share a great number of similar features (e.g. attitudes, values, behavioural responses). The overall understanding of psychological disorders ought thus be universal.
