Txtbook Chapter 1 Flashcards
What are the three broad criteria mental health professionals have proposed to help identify psychological problems in youths?
Deviancy, disability, and distress.
How do we define abnormality based on statistical deviation?
abnormal behaviors are defined by their relative infrequency in the general population.
What is the primary issue with using statistical deviation to define abnormality?
Statistical deviation does not take into account the context of a child’s behavior. (i.e. a child is acting withdrawn due to a recent family death.)
How do we define abnormality based on disability or degree of impairment?
abnormal behavior is characterized by thoughts, feelings, or actions that infer with a child’s social or academic functioning.
What is the primary issue with using disability or degree of impairment to define abnormality?
Many youths with psychological disorders do not show obvious signs of impairment.
What is the primary issue with using distress to define abnormality?
distress is subjective. Additionally, some children with psychological issues may never experience distress.
What is harmful dysfunction?
A definition for abnormality proposed by Jerome Wakefield. A behavior is abnormal if it reflects an underlying dysfunction in a biological or physical system and it causes disability or distress.
What are the three limitations of the DSM-5 medical conceptualization of mental disorders?
We do not know the underlying cause of children’s psychological problems.
Many childhood disorders are relational in nature (they happen between children and specific adults, not within the child).
Children’s behavior can only be understood in terms of their social-cultural surroundings.
What is a sign vs a symptom?
A sign is an overt feature of a disorder, a symptom is a subjective experience associated with a disorder.
DSM-5 uses a hybrid of what three different approaches for classification?
categorical, prototypical, and dimensional.
What does categorical classification involve?
dividing mental disorders into mutually exclusive groups or categories, based on sets of essential criteria.
What is prototypical classification based on?
the degree to which the individual’s signs and symptoms map onto the ideal picture or prototype of the disorder.
What does dimensional classification involve?
Assumes that disorders fall along a continuum of severity ranging from mild to severe. It involves describing the severity of the individual’s distress and/or disability on this continuum.
What is a diagnostic specifier?
a label that describes a relatively homogenous subgroup of individuals with the same disorder.
