Personality Disorders General

Question 1

What is Millon’s personalogic model?

Answer 1

• Each person is endowed with advantages & disadvantages that influence his/her adaptive abilities
• Normal, healthy personality functioning
• Evolutionary imperatives compel and drive behavior

Question 2

Milton’s Evolutionary Imperative: Existence

Answer 2

• Survival, and enhancing existence through
  
  • Avoiding negative, threatening stimuli
  • Pursuing positive, life-enhancing stimuli
  • Pleasure pursuit- pain avoidance

Can be highly oriented to both. Enhancement vs. Preservation

Question 3

Milton’s Evolutionary Imperative: Adaptation

Answer 3

• Style of approaching/interacting with environment
• Adapt to one’s environment
• Adapt the environment to one’s needs
• Active vs. Passive approaches

Tends to be a true polarity- can lie in the middle, not likely that people are high on both approaches.

Question 4

Milton’s Evolutionary Imperative: Reproduction

Answer 4

Reproduction - Replication

• species regeneration
• sources of reinforcement
• self- other orientations

Can be high in both self and other orientations

Question 5

Milton’s Model and Beck’s Cognitive Model

Answer 5

Core Beliefs: self image, related to how we see ourselves
Intermediate Beliefs: rules, how we can come to satisfy survival/task/ imperative
Automatic Thoughts: give a glue into what peoples core beliefs are, insight on the orientation of imperative

Question 6

What is the distinction between personality disorders and traits/prototypes?

Answer 6

Personality Traits

• enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about environment and oneself
• exhibited in wide range of social and personal contexts

Personality Disorders

• when traits are inflexible, maladaptive, and cause significant functional impairment or distress
• Enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of one’s culture

Question 7

Personality Disorders, per DSM-IV

Answer 7

A. Enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of one’s culture; Manifested in at least two of the following areas: cognition, affectivity, interpersonal functioning, impulse control

B. Pattern is inflexible, and pervasive across range of situations

C. Pattern leads to clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning

D. Pattern is stable and of long duration, and its onset can be tracked back to at least adolescence or early adult hood

E. Not better accounted for by another mental disorder

F. Not due to effects of substance or GMC

Question 8

What are the personality clusters, per DSM-IV

Answer 8

Cluster A- odd/eccentric
Cluster B- dramatic/emotional/erratic
Cluster C- anxious/fearful

Question 9

What are some important considerations relevant to Axis II (e.g., distinction between Axes I and II, comorbidity issues, stability/instability of PDs; see Clark, 2007)

Answer 9

• Similar ethnological basis
• Temporal course differences are limited to episodic Axis I disorders
• Comorbidity ranges from 66-97%
• Many patients meet criteria for more than one personality disorder
• Across several longitudinal studies, PDs were only moderate in their stability- more fluctuating course then previously thought
• This may be due to: true variations of PD overs time, measurement error, variation in less stable behaviors (vs. more stability in traits), variation similar to that seen in normal traits