Personality Disorders

Question 1

Personality Disorders

Answer 1

stable, inflexible, and maladaptive personality styles

•unresolved conflicts tend to re-emerge

Question 2

What personality disorder is the most destructive to society?

Answer 2

The antisocial personality disorder

Question 3

According to the DMS-5, what are the 6 types of personality disorders ?

Answer 3

1. Antisocial
2. Narcissistic
3. Borderline
4. Avoidant
5. Obsessive-Compulsice
6. Schizotypal

Question 4

What are the major features of Narcissistic personality disorder?

Answer 4

Grandiose fantasies or behaviour, lack of empathy and oversensitivity to evaluation; constant need for admiration from others; proud self-display

Question 5

What are the major features of Borderline personality disorder?

Answer 5

Pattern of severe instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships and emotion, often expressing alternating extremes of love and hatred toward the same person; high frequency of manipulative suicidal behaviour

Question 6

What are the major features of Avoidant personality disorder?

Answer 6

Extreme social discomfort and timidity; feelings of inadequacy and fearfulness of being negatively evaluated

Question 7

What are the major features of Obsessive– Compulsive personality disorder?

Answer 7

extreme perfectionism, orderliness and inflexibility; preoccupied with mental and interpersonal control

Question 8

What are the major features of Schizotypal personality disorder?

Answer 8

Odd thoughts, appearance, behaviour and extreme discomfort in social situations

Question 9

Antisocial personality disorder

Answer 9

a disorder involving behaviour that is interpersonally destructive and emotionally harmful and exhibits a lack of conscience. Formerly called psychopaths or sociopaths. Males outnumber females 3 to 1, they are not all antisocial

Question 10

What are the two behavioural clusters of behaviours associated with psychopathy?

Answer 10

1. Selfishness, callousness and interpersonal manipulation
2. Impulsivity, instability and social deviance
   •A diagnosis of antisocial personality requires both behaviour clusters

Question 11

How do psychopaths put themselves out to the society?

Answer 11

Charming, very intelligent, ability to rationalize their inappropriate behaviour

Question 12

What is the heritability of antisocial behaviour?

Answer 12

0.4 to 0.5

Question 13

What physiological dysfunctions in the brain may be related to antisocial behaviour, what are they linked to?

Answer 13

Emotional arousal and behavioural self-control from The amygdala and the prefrontal cortex
•leads to impulsiveness, chronically unaroused state, impairs avoidance learning, causes boredom and that leads to search for excitement

Antisocial patients also have lower heart rates when under stress Neurological deficits in prefrontal cortex

Question 14

What is the difference between how psychodynamic theorists, psychoanalyst theorists and cognitive theorists view antisocial behaviour?

Answer 14

Psychodynamic: Psychopaths lack conscious

Psychoanalysts: Psychopaths lack anxiety and guilt because they did not develop an adequate superego

Cognitive: consistent failure to think about or anticipate the long term negative consequences of their acts. (act impulsively)

Question 15

What would cause a failure or lack of super ego?

Answer 15

Inadequate identification with appropriate adult figures because these figures were either physically or psychologically unavailable to the child

Question 16

Where can modelling antisocial behaviour come from?

Answer 16

Parents/ families

Peers

Question 17

How do learning theorists believe that antisocial behaviour is developed?

Answer 17

The poor impulse control occurs in individuals because of an impaired ability to develop conditioned fear responses when punished.
This corresponds to the lower physiological arousal and amygdala activity identified with brain recordings

Question 18

What did Hans Eysenck believe in regard to antisocial behaviour>

Answer 18

Developing a conscious depends on an ability to learn fear and inhibitory avoidance responses, and people who fail to do so will be less able to inhibit their behaviour

Question 19

Borderline Personality Disorder

Answer 19

a collection of symptoms characterized primarily by serious instability in behaviour, emotion, identity, and interpersonal relationships

Question 20

Borderline Personality disorder is apparent in ____ to ____ % of the general population.
about 2/3 are _____

Answer 20

3 to 5

women

Question 21

What is a central feature in BPD? Explain it

Answer 21

Emotional dysregulation
an inability to control negative emotions in response of stressful life events
Many of which borderline individuals themselves cause

Question 22

What disorders is BPD associated with?

Answer 22

Mood disorders
PTSD
Substance– abuse disorders

Question 23

What are borderline patients hard to treat?

Answer 23

Clinging dependency
Irrational anger
Tendency to engage in manipulative suicide threats and gestures as effort to control the therapist

Question 24

Read this
As they mature, the behaviours of borderline individuals tend to evoke negative reactions and rejections from others, affirming their sense of worthlessness and their view of the world as malevolent

Answer 24

As they mature, the behaviours of borderline individuals tend to evoke negative reactions and rejections from others, affirming their sense of worthlessness and their view of the world as malevolent

Question 25

Splitting

Answer 25

the failure to integrate positive and negative aspects of another’s behaviour into a coherent whole
Ex. a parent who is usually accepting but sometimes voices disapproval
•Reflects the sudden shift from extreme love and clinging dependence to intense hatred or feeling of abandonment

Question 26

BPD is an interaction between what factors?

Answer 26

Biological,
early history of trauma, rejection and psychological if not physical abandonment
Sociocultural (in societies that are unstable and rapidly changing)