Exam #2

Question 1

(1) Provide a 1-sentence description (not an extensive list of diagnostic criteria) for each of the following 3 anxiety disorders. It should be clear from these 1-sentence descriptions alone how the 3 disorders differ from each other.

• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
• Panic disorder
• Specific phobia

Answer 1

• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): A disorder where the patient experiences EXCCESIVE, IRRATIONAL, PERSISTENT, and UNCONTROLLABLE anxiety and worry, occurring more days than not for at least 6
  months, causing clinically significant distress
  or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
• Panic disorder: A disorder characterized by recurrent unexpected panic attacks, or an abrupt surge of intense fear or intense discomfort that reaches a peak within
  minutes - typically involving physical symptoms
• Specific phobia: An intense, persistent fear of a specific object or situation that is out of proportion to the actual risk where the phobic object or situation is actively avoided or endured with
  intense fear or anxiety

Question 2

Describe 3 major differences between major depressive disorder (MDD) and persistent depressive disorder (a.k.a.: dysthymia). Please be specific.

Answer 2

• With MDD, the symptoms/depressive episodes occur for at least 2 weeks and are usually separated by two-month periods but for persistent depressive disorder, the symptoms occur for at least 2 years
• Dysthymia is less common than MDD because 1.5% of Americans get diagnosed with it annually while 7% of Americans get diagnosed with MDD annually.
• PDD is often diagnosed later in life, like adulthood.

Question 3

• Provide a 1-sentence description (not an extensive list of diagnostic criteria) of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
• Define the terms “obsessions” and “compulsions” as they apply to OCD.
  QUESTION TO ASK DURING DROP IN HOURS can you only write 1 sentence, or one sentence per answer?

Answer 3

OCD is a mental disorder chracterized by falling into a cycle of obsessions (recurring thoughts and urges that cause the patient fear and anxiety) and compulsions (repeated behaviors as a response to those thoughts, aiming to reduce stress).

Question 4

(4) Imagine a person goes to their annual checkup at their doctor’s office. The doctor’s report states that person appears to be in fine physical health overall. At the end of the visit, the doctor asks, “Is there anything else related to your health that we haven’t discussed?” After thinking about it for a moment, the patient remembers that a few months ago, they experienced seeing a person who is not actually there. The next week, they experienced seeing that non-existent person again. When the doctor asks, the patient reports that this hasn’t happened again after the second time, and that it has not affected their work or personal life, but they thought they should mention it. Based on the DSM criteria for schizophrenia specifically, explain whether this person should or should not be diagnosed with schizophrenia, and why.

Answer 4

This person should not be diagnosed with schizophrenia, because they only experienced one symptom, hallucinations. Also, to diagnose them, the symptoms need to be present for the majority of the time for at least a month.

Question 5

Imagine a person goes to their annual checkup at their doctor’s office. The doctor’s report states that person appears to be in fine physical health overall. At the end of the visit, the doctor asks, “Is there anything else related to your health that we haven’t discussed?” After thinking about it for a moment, the patient remembers that a few months ago, they experienced seeing a person who is not actually there. The next week, they experienced seeing that non-existent person again. When the doctor asks, the patient reports that this hasn’t happened again after the second time, and that it has not affected their work or personal life, but they thought they should mention it. Based on the general DSM criterion that is required for any mental illness diagnosis, explain whether this person should or should not be diagnosed with schizophrenia, and why.

Answer 5

This person still should not be diagnosed because the DSM criteria says that the symptoms must be affecting one’s daily life to be qualified as a mental disorder.

Question 6

• According to the diathesis-stress model, what factors determine whether or not a person is likely to develop a mental disorder?
• Provide an example of each of these factors.

Answer 6

The diathesis-stress model introduces heredity and experiences as factors for how likely someone is to develop a mental disorder
* an example of heredity(diathesis) is genetically having a hyperactive amygdala, which could be a source for anxiety
* examples of experience (stress) are trauma, family conflict, divorce, job loss, etc.

Question 7

• Define the concept of comorbidity.
• Provide an example of two disorders that have a tendency to be comorbid.

Answer 7

Comorbidity is when two or more disorders are present within a person at once
* Example: MDD and PTSD or MDD and GAD

Question 8

(8) According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory:

• What causes people to develop mental illnesses?
• What does therapy need to involve in order to help treat this hypothesized cause of mental illness?

Answer 8

• Sigmond Freud believed that people developed mental illnesses by having unconscious desires, struggles, and conflicts.
• Therapy needed to involve bringing those unconscious thoughts to consciousness for the patient to recover from them. This can be done through a technique called free association where the patient is told to speak or write down anything that comes to mind

Question 9

(10) Describe how both the characteristics present in people with anorexia nervosa, and the way in which therapists attempt to treat anorexia nervosa using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), align with CBT’s underlying assumptions about what causes people to develop mental illnesses, and what therapy need to involve in order to help treat mental illnesses.

Answer 9

What are the problematic cognitions and problematic behaviors of anorexia
- unlearn the cognition of the belief that they will become fat from eating
- start eating
- stop seeing themselves as fat

Question 9

According to the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT):

• What causes people to develop mental illnesses?
• What does therapy need to involve in order to help treat this hypothesized cause of mental illness?

Answer 9

• Noba Definition: Thoughts, behaviors, and emotions contribute to mental disorders in a cycle: thoughts create feelings -> feelings create behavior, behaviors reinforce thoughts
• Mental illnesses are based on faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking (cognitions), and in part, on
  learned patterns of unhelpful behavior
• Therapy needs to involve cogniting restructuring and behavior restricting. This can be done by setting behavioral goals, leading the patient to change their mindset.

Question 10

(11) For each of the following drug categories, please indicate which category of mental disorders that we have covered in this course they are primarily used to treat.

• Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
• Benzodiazepines
• Anti-psychotic medications

Answer 10

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
* treat depressive disorders
Benzodiazepines
* treat anxiety disorders
Anti-psychotic medications
* treat psychotic disorders like Bipolar Disorder and schizophrenia

Question 11

COME BACK TO THIS QUESTION
(12) For each of the following drug categories, please indicate which neurotransmitter it affects, and in what way it alters the usual functioning of that neurotransmitter.

• Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
• Benzodiazepines
• Anti-psychotic medications

Answer 11

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)
* Serotonin
Benzodiazepines
* Gamma-aminobutyric
acid (GABA)
Anti-psychotic medications
* Dopamine

Question 12

• Define the terms “sensation” and “perception.”
• Provide an example of each concept. It should be clear from your examples alone how the 2 concepts differ from each other.

Answer 12

Sensation: the basic registration of light, sound, pressure, odor, or taste by a sense organ
* raw data is detected by sensory receptors: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, etc.
Perception
* the active organization and interpretation of a sensation by the brain
To demonstrate the difference, an example of sensation would be seeing bright flashing lights and perception would be recognizing that the flashing light is a police car’s signal.

Question 13

• Define the psychological concept of “attention.”
• How does attention help explain the fact that sensation can occur without perception?

Answer 13

Attention is the cognitive process that enables us to select which information to ignore and which to process further.
Although we like to think we take in everything, we can only process a tiny fraction of all sensory information that reaches our sensory organs

This explains sensation without perception because our sensory receptors are always actively being exposed to information, but we are not processing all of it because we are focused on specific things to process.

Question 14

• Is it possible for perception to occur without sensation?
• Provide an example that supports your answer that it either is or is not possible for perception to occur without sensation.

Answer 14

Yes, it is possible for perception to occur without sensation.
Example: phantom limb syndrome, hallucinations

Question 15

• Define the term “transduction” as it applies to the process of sensation.
• What specific parts of the relevant sense organ are responsible for visual transduction and for auditory transduction? (Naming the sense organs without naming the specific parts of those sense organs that are actually responsible for transduction will not receive full credit.)

Answer 15

Transduction is the conversion of physical signals in the environment into electrical signals that can be understood by the brain. Examples of this concept is sound waves into sounds that we can hear or light waves/photons into vision.

• for sound: the cochlea
• for vision, the retina

Question 16

(17) Indicate whether humans sense color, perceive color, or both. Explain your answer—what exactly do you mean when you say that humans sense but not perceive color/perceive but not sense color/both sense and perceive color?

Answer 16

Humans do both. Color is esentially different wavelengths, and we have specific photoreceptor cells that detect specific wavelengths (color) (sensation)
When the detection and information from the photoreceptors reach the brain,

Question 17

(18) Describe the process by which our photoreceptors and brain work together to enable us to distinguish colors.

Answer 17

We have 3 different photoreceptors, for low (blue), medium (green), and high wavelengths. When we see, each photoreceptor is fired but some more than others. Our brain uses the level of activity in the 3 different cones to establish color

Question 18

• Define the term “visual adaptation.”
• What does the existence of visual adaptation teach us about the kinds of cues that our visual systems are especially attuned to?

Answer 18

Photoreceptors react less and
less the longer they are exposed to the same
stimulus, resulting in a decrease in signal to the
brain and, thus, reduced perception of the colors
associated with those specific photoreceptors.
* This teaches us that our visual systems don’t care about consistency and we are good at sensing change

Question 19

(20) Invisibilia’s “How to Become Batman” discusses neuroscientist Lore Thaler’s study comparing the brain activity of sighted people when they look at objects to that of blind people using echolocation on those same objects. Describe, in detail:

• How this study was conducted (e.g., who were the participants, what did the participants do or what was done to them, etc.);
• The results of her study, and;
• The implications of these results for the idea that visual perception can occur without visual sensation.

Answer 19

“Lore brought Daniel and a few other people who can echolocate into her lab and she took recordings of them while they clicked at different objects in space. A car, a lamp post, a salad bowl, a salad bowl in motion. The microphones are actually in their ears, so we recorded what they heard exactly [when the clicks bounced back off the objects and into their ears]. And then she played the recordings back to them, one object at a time while they were lying down in fMRI machines so she could watch how their brains responded. [The clicks they heard when a] salad bowl [was in front of them, and those from when a] salad bowl in motion [was in front of them]. And then she compared those readings to what happens in the brains of sighted people looking at the same kinds of things (salad bowl. Salad bowl in motion). And what she found is that even though for decades scientists assumed that the visual cortex goes dark when you’re blind, Daniel’s was lighting up like a disco ball.”

Question 20

(21) Name and define 3 cues that humans use to perceive depth.

Answer 20

• Relative size: objects that are closer to us appear larger than objects that are far away
• Linear perspective: parallel lines seem to converge as they grow distant
• Retinal disparity: Differences in the image that each eye sees when looking at an object

Question 21

• Name and define the 3 properties of sound that humans are able to sense.
• For each of these 3 properties of sound that humans are able to sense, indicate what characteristic of sounds humans are able to perceive based on that property.

Answer 21

Frequency (Pitch perception)
Amplitude (Perception of loudness)
Timbre and complexity (sound quality perception)