HPS121-T2-Ch15-Psychological Disorders

Question 1

Abnormal behaviour:

Answer 1

behaviour that is personally distressful, personally dysfunctional and/or so culturally deviant that other people judge it to be inappropriate or maladaptive.

Question 2

Agoraphobia:

Answer 2

a fear of being in places or situations (e.g. on a bridge or a bus, in a crowds or wide open spaces) from which escape might be difficult in the event of sudden incapacitation.

Question 3

Antisocial personality disorder (APD):

Answer 3

a long-term stable disorder characterised by a lack of conscience, defects in empathy and a tendency to act in an impulsive manner that disregards future consequences.

Question 4

Anxiety:

Answer 4

an emotional state characterised by apprehension accompanied by physiological arousal and fearful behaviour.

Question 5

Anxiety and related disorders:

Answer 5

a group of behaviour disorders in which anxiety and associated maladaptive behaviours are the core of the behaviour.

Question 6

Bipolar disorder:

Answer 6

a mood disorder in which intermittent mania appears against a background of depression.

Question 7

Borderline personality disorder (BPD):

Answer 7

a serious personality disorder characterised by severe inability in behaviour, emotion, identity and interpersonal relationships.

Question 8

Competency:

Answer 8

a legal decision that a defendant is mentally capable of understanding the nature of the charges, participating meaningfully in the trial and consulting with his or her attorney.

Question 9

Compulsion:

Answer 9

a repetitive act that the person feels compelled to carry out, often in response to an obsessive thought or image.

Question 10

Conversion disorder:

Answer 10

a disorder in which serious neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, loss of sensation or blindness, suddenly occur without physical cause.

Question 11

Culture-bound disorders:

Answer 11

behaviour disorders whose specific forms are restricted to one particular cultural context.

Question 12

Delusions:

Answer 12

false beliefs, often involving themes of persecution and grandeur, that are sustained in the face of evidence that normally would be sufficient to destroy them.

Question 13

Depressive attributional pattern:

Answer 13

the tendency of depressed people to attribute negative outcomes to their own inadequacies and positive outcomes to factors outside of themselves.

Question 14

Depressive cognitive triad:

Answer 14

negative thoughts concerning (1) the world, (2) oneself and (3) the future.

Question 15

Dissociative disorder:

Answer 15

disorders that involve a major dissociation of personal identity nor memory.

Question 16

Dissociative identity disorder (DID):

Answer 16

a dissociative disorder in which two or more separate identities or personalities coexist within an individual.

Question 17

Dopamine hypothesis:

Answer 17

states that the symptoms of schizophrenia are produced by overactivity of the dopamine system in areas of the brain that regulate emotional expression, motivated behaviour and cognitive functioning.

Question 18

Generalised anxiety disorder:

Answer 18

a chronic state of diffuse, or ‘free-floating’, anxiety that is not attached to specific situations or objects.

Question 19

Hallucinations:

Answer 19

false perceptions that have a compelling sense of reality.

Question 20

Insanity:

Answer 20

a legal decision that a defendant was so severely impaired at the time a crime was committed that he or she was incapable of appreciating the wrongfulness of the act or controlling his or her behaviour.

Question 21

Learned helplessness theory:

Answer 21

a theory of depression maintaining that if people are unable to control life events, they develop a state of helplessness that leads to depressive symptoms.

Question 22

Major depression:

Answer 22

a mood disorder characterised by intense depression that interferes markedly with functioning.

Question 23

Mania:

Answer 23

a state of intense emotional and behavioural excitement in which a person feels very optimistic and energised.

Question 24

Mood disorders:

Answer 24

psychological disorders whose core conditions involving maladaptive mood states, such as depression or mania.

Question 25

Negative symptoms:

Answer 25

schizophrenic symptoms that reflect a lack o0f normal reactions , such as emotions, speech or social behaviours.

Question 26

Neurotic anxiety:

Answer 26

in psychoanalytic theory, a state of anxiety that arises when impulses from the id threatens to break through into awareness or behaviour.

Question 27

Obsession:

Answer 27

an unwanted and disturbing thought or image that invades consciousness and is very difficult to control.

Question 28

Panic disorder:

Answer 28

an anxiety disorder characterised by unpredictable panic attacks and a pervasive fear that another will occur; may also result in agoraphobia.

Question 29

Personality disorder:

Answer 29

stable, inflexible and maladaptive ways of thinking, feeling and acting.

Question 30

Phobia:

Answer 30

strong and irrational fears of particular objects or circumstances.

Question 31

Positive symptoms:

Answer 31

schizophrenic symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and disordered speech and thinking.

Question 32

Post-traumatic stress disorder:

Answer 32

a pattern of distressing symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares, avoidance and anxiety responses that recur after a traumatic experience.

Question 33

Regression:

Answer 33

a psychoanalytic defence mechanism in which a person retreats to an earlier stage of development in response to stress.

Question 34

Reliability:

Answer 34

in psychological testing, the consistency with which a measure assesses a given characteristic or different observers agree on a given score. Diagnostic reliability refers to agreement among clinicians making diagnostic judgements.

Question 35

Schizophrenia:

Answer 35

a psychotic disorder involving serious impairments of attention, thought, language, emotion and behaviour.

Question 36

Social causation hypothesis:

Answer 36

the proposition that attributes the higher prevalence of schizophrenia in low-income people to the greater stress they experience.

Question 37

Social drift hypothesis:

Answer 37

the notion that as people develop schizophrenia, their personal and occupational functioning deteriorates, so that they drift down the socioeconomic ladder.

Question 38

Social phobia:

Answer 38

an excessive and inappropriate fear of social situations in which a person might be evaluated and possibly embarrassed.

Question 39

Specific phobia:

Answer 39

an irrational and excessive fear of specific objects or situations that pose little or no actual threat.

Question 40

Splitting:

Answer 40

a tendency, often found in people with borderline personality disorder, to not integrate the positive and negative aspects of another’s behaviour into a coherent cognitive representation of the person.

Question 41

Suicide:

Answer 41

the wilful taking of one’s own life.

Question 42

Trauma dissociation theory:

Answer 42

accounts for the development of d9issociative identity disorder as a defence against severe childhood abuse or trauma.

Question 43

Triple vulnerability model of emotional disorders:

Answer 43

a theoretical model of psychopathology that there are common biological , psychological and environmental vulnerability factors that foster the development of anxiety and depressive disorders.

Question 44

Validity:

Answer 44

the extent to which a test actually measures what it is supposed to measure; the degree to which a diagnostic system’s categories contain the core features of the behaviour disorders and permit differentiation among the disorders.

Question 45

Vulnerability-stress model:

Answer 45

explains behaviour disorders as resulting from predisposing biological or psychological vulnerability factors that are triggered by a stressor.