Clinical Psychology Flashcards
A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.
Psychological Disorder
A psychological Disorder marked by the appearance by age seven of one or more three key symptoms: extreme inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
The concept that diseases, in the case of psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital.
Medical Model
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth edition; a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders.
DSM-5
Symptoms that create feelings or events. Some examples include hallucinations and paranoia.
*Positive Symptoms
Symptoms that remove feelings or events. Some examples include not being able to feel emotion, and withdrawing from social situations.
*Negative Symptoms
Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviors that reduce anxiety.
Anxiety Disorders
An anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
An anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations. Often followed by worry over a possible next attack.
Panic Disorder
An anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.
Phobia
Intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such. (Formerly called social phobia.)
Social Anxiety Disorder
Fear or avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide open places, where one has felt loss of control and panic. For example, you may fear using public transportation, being in open or enclosed spaces, standing in line, or being in a crowd.
Agoraphobia
A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts and/or actions.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Positive psychological changes as a result of struggling with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises.
Posttraumatic Growth
Psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes. Examples include major depressive disorder, mania, and bipolar disorder.
Mood Disorders
How many weeks must someone have persistent depression before it is considered Major Depressive Disorder?
Two weeks
A mood disorder marked by a hyperactive, wildly optimistic state.
Mania
A mood disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania. (Formerly called manic-depressive disorder.)
Bipolar Disorder
Compulsive fretting; overthinking about our problems and their causes.
Rumination
A psychological Disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished or inappropriate emotional expression.
Schizophrenia
A psychological disorder in which a person loses contact with reality, experiencing irrational ideas and distorted perceptions.
Psychosis
False beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany a psychotic disorder. Is a positive symptom.
Delusions
False sensory experience, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus. Is a positive symptom.
Hallucination
A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause.
Somatic Symptom Disorder
A disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no physiological basis can be found.
Conversion Disorder
A disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease.
Illness Anxiety Disorder or Hypochondriasis
Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.
Dissociative Disorders
A rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder.
Dissociative Identity Disorder
An eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly (15 percent or more) underweight.
Anorexia
An eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high-calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use), excessive exercise, or fasting.
Bulimia Nervosa
Significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging or fasting that marks Bulimia Nervosa.
Binge-eating Disorder
Psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.
Personality Disorders
A personality disorder in with a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive and ruthless or a a clever con artist.
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Treatment involving psychological techniques; consist of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.
Psychotherapy
Prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person’s physiology.
Biomedical therapy
An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy.
Elective Approach
In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.
Resistance
In psychoanalysis, the analysts nothing supposed dream meanings, resistances and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.
Interpretation
In psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent.)
Transference
Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.
Psychodynamic Therapy
A variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses.
Insight Therapies
A humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such a s active listening with a genuine, accepting, empathetic environment to facilitate clients’ growth.
Client-Centered Therapy
Empathetic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers’ client-centered therapy.
Active Listening
A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.
Unconditional Positive Regard
Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
Behavior Therapy
Behavior Therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.
Counterconditioning
Behavioral techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.
Exposure Therapies
A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant, relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.
Systematic Desensitization
An anxiety treatment that progressively exposes people to electronic simulations of their greatest fears, such as an airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
Pattern of distrust and suspiciousness about other people’s motives, individual thinks that others are out to threaten, betray, exploit, or harm
Paranoid Personality Disorder “Accusatory”
Characterized by persistent avoidance of social relationships and little expression of emotion
Schizoid Personality Disorder “Aloof”
