Psychiatry Flashcards
Positive vs Negative Reinforcement:
Positive: desired reward produces action (ie mouse presses button to get food)
Negative: removal of aversive stimulus elicits behavior (ie mouse presses button to avoid shock)
Transference:
patient projects feelings about an important person in life onto physician (like saying that the psychiatrist = parent)
Counter-transference:
physician projects feelings about important people in life onto patient
Acting out:
- immature defense
- ->like tantrums; unacceptable feelings and thoughts are expressed through actions
Dissociation:
–>seen in Multiple Personality Disorder (Dissociative Identity Disorder)
–>In order to avoid emotional distress, have rapid, temporary, drastic changes in personality, memory, consciousness, behavior…
Displacement:
avoided ideas and feelings are transferred to a neutral person or object
–> like a mother placing blame on child, when really she is angry at her husband
Projection:
unacceptable personal internal impulse is attributed to an external souce
–>like a man who wants another woman thinks his wife is cheating on him
Fixation:
Partially remaining at more childish level of development
–>like a man who fixates on sports games; or maybe a man who fixates on comic books and superhero movies…
Identification:
modeling behavior after another person who is more powerful (not necessarily an admired person though)
–>like an abused child identifying as an abuser (abusing others…)
Isolation of effect:
separation of feelings from ideas and events
–>like describing murder in detail without an emotional response; or maybe war veterans having no emotions when talking about war
Rationalization:
finding logical reasons for actions that were actually performed for other reasons, to avoid self-blame
–>like after getting fired from a job, person claims that job was not important anyway
Reaction formation:
–>process where a warded-off idea or feeling is unconsciously replaced by an emphasis on its opposite
–>like a person with lots of sexual drive entering a monastery
Regression:
–>turning back maturational clock and dealing with world immaturely
–>like a child bedwetting after previously being toilet-trained, when under stress (like if ill, hospitalized, punished, birth of new sibling…)
Repression:
–>involuntary withholding idea/feeling from conscious awareness
–>like not remembering a traumatic/conflictual experience; push bad thoughts in unconscious
Splitting:
- ->seen in Borderline Personality Disorder
- belief that people are either all-good or all-bad at different times
Which immature defense is seen in dissociative identity/multiple personality disorder?
–>Dissociation
Which immature defense is seen in Borderline pts?
–>Splitting
List the 4 mature defenses:
“a Mature woman wears a SASH”
- Sublimation
- Altruism
- Suppression
- Humor
Sublimation:
- ->mature ego defense
- replacing an unacceptable wish with actions that are similar to the wish, but don’t conflict with values
–>like a person’s feelings of aggression redirected to perform well in sports
Altruism:
–>a mature ego defense
-guilty feelings alleviated by unsolicited generosity towards others
–>ie mafia boss making large donation to charity; or former alcoholic who got in an accident while drunk-driving going around talking to teens about risks of drinking and driving…
Humor:
- ->mature ego defense
- finding amusement in anxiety-provoking situations
- ->med students joking about the boards
Suppression:
- ->mature ego defense
- voluntary withholding idea/feeling from conscious awareness (vs repression, which is unconscious)
–>ie choosing not to think about USMLE scores after the exam, b/c nothing you can do about it :)
Effects of infant deprivation:
- Weak (decreased muscle tone)
- poor language and socialization skills
- lack of trust
- Anaclitic depression (from separation from caregiver)
- weight loss
- physical illness
Consequences of of prolonged infant deprivation:
- Deprivation > 6months –> can be irreversible
* Severe deprivation can result in infant death