UNIT 8 ABNORMAL BEHAVIOR & TREATMENT Flashcards
Clinical diagnosis is based on what book?
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)
Dysfunctional
Frequently used to indicate disturbance.
- Dysfunctional behaviors is a maladaptive and often distressful and/or irrational.
M’Naghten Rule
Determines if a defendant should be held criminally responsible for their illegal actions.
It simply asks if the individual was able to differentiate right from wrong at the time of action.
The DSM
Classifies and explains all widely recognized psychological disorders, improving reliability of diagnostic judgement.
Psychological Disorder
A syndrome (collection of symptoms) marked by a “clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior.”
Medical Model
Psychological disorders have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and, in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital.
The Biopsychosocial Approach
considers biological, psychological, and social factors and their complex interactions in understanding health and illness.
Etiology
Cause of psychological disorders.
The Behavioral Approach (How does it relate to mental illness?)
All about the effects and consequences of your behaviors and the effects of the environment.
HOW IT RELATES TO MENTAL ILLNESS:
Views mental illness as being due to the environment and the consequences of behaviors.
The Psychoanalytic Approach (How does it relate to mental illness?)
How the unconscious mind influences your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
HOW IT RELATES TO MENTAL ILLNESS:
Views mental illness as unresolved, unconscious conflicts that create anxiety and emotional disruption.
The Cognitive Approach (How does it relate to mental illness?)
Our behavior is influenced by learning and experience (nurture), but also by some of our brains’ innate capacities as information processors e.g. language acquisition (nature).
HOW IT RELATES TO MENTAL ILLNESS:
Views illness as troubling thoughts that create outcomes that can be dysfunctional.
The Biological Approach (How does it relate to mental illness?)
Believes behavior to be as a consequence of our genetics and physiology.
HOW IT RELATES TO MENTAL ILLNESS:
The medical model focuses on the physical aspects of mental illness, like genetics, anatomy, and biochemistry.
What are dangers of being labeled?
- Being falsely diagnosed.
Anxiety disorders
Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or defective behaviors that reduce anxiety.
Social anxiety disorder
Becoming extremely anxious in social settings where others might judge them, such as parties, class presentations, or even eating in public.
Generalized anxiety disorder
A person is unexplainably and continually tense and uneasy.
Panic disorder
A person experiences panic attacks—sudden episodes of intense dread—and fears the next episode’s unpredictable onset.
Phobias
A person is intensely and irrationally afraid of a specific object, activity, or situation.
Obsessive-compulsive Disorder (OCD)
A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions), actions (compulsions), or both.
Obsessive thoughts
unwanted and so repetitive thoughts may seem that they will never go away.
Compulsive behaviors
Are often responses to those obsessive thoughts.
Hoarding disorder
Cluttering one’s space with acquired possessions one can’t let go.
Body Dysmorphic
Preoccupation with perceived body defects
Trichotillomania
hair-pulling
Excoriation disorder
Excessive skin-picking
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, hypervigilance, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBI)
Results from a violent blow or jolt to the head or body.
Acute Stress Disorder
An intense, unpleasant, and dysfunctional reaction beginning shortly after an overwhelming traumatic event and lasting less than a month
What are Neurodevelopmental Disorders?
A category of disorders that typically emerge during the time when you are developing and growing~ childhood and adolescence
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
- Autism affects communication and behavior
- Symptoms usually appear by the age of two
Attentiom Defict Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
- Involves presistent patterns of attention difficulties, hyperactive behavior, and impulsivity
- Individual loses focus, is disorganized, and frequently gets off task. THIS IS NOT DUE TO THE LACK OF COMPREHENSION
- Individual will speak or act without thinking first, even in ways that may be harmful
Major depressive disorder (Clinical Depression)
Occurs when at least five signs of depression (including either depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure) last two or more weeks.
Monoamine Deficiency Theory
Predicts that the underlying pathophysiologic basis of depression is a decrease in the levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and/or dopamine in the central nervous system.
Dysthymia
Another word for Persistent Depressive Disorder
Bipolar Disorder
Individual bounces from one emotional extreme to the other (week to week, rather than day to day or moment to moment).
Mania
A hyperactive, wildly optimistic state in which dangerously poor judgment is common.
Norepinephrine
Increases arousal and boosts mood
Rumination
Compulsive fretting; overthinking our problems and their causes.
Learned Helplessness
The hopelessness and passive resignation humans and other animals learn when they experience uncontrollable painful events
Lauren Alloy
Monitored several hundred students every 6 weeks for 2.5 years. Among those identified as having a pessimistic thinking style, 17 percent had a first episode of major depression, as did only 1 percent of those who began college with an optimistic thinking style.
Pessimistic Thinking Style
Individuals personally blame themselves for bad events and think the cause was something permanent.
Schizophrenia
A disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished, inappropriate emotional expression.
Positive symptoms of Schizophrenia
Individuals may experience hallucinations, talk in disorganized and deluded ways, and exhibit inappropriate laughter, tears, or rage.
Negative symptoms of Schizophrenia
Individuals may exhibit an absence of emotion in their voices, expressionless faces, or unmoving—mute and rigid—bodies.
Chronic Schizophrenia (Process Schizophrenia)
(also called process schizophrenia) a form of schizophrenia in which symptoms usually appear by late adolescence or early adulthood. As people age, psychotic episodes last longer, and recovery periods shorten.
Acute Schizophrenia (Reactive Schizophrenia)
When previously well-adjusted people develop schizophrenia rapidly following particular life stresses
When participants heard a voice or saw something, their brain became vigorously active in several core regions.
One is?
One was the THALAMUS, the structure that filters incoming sensory signals and transmits them to the brain’s cortex.
Somatic Symptom Disorder (Somatoform Disorder)
In which distressing symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical causes. One person may have a variety of complaints—vomiting, dizziness, blurred vision, difficulty in swallowing.
Psychotherapy
A trained therapist uses psychological techniques to assist someone seeking either to overcome difficulties or to achieve personal growth.
EXAMPLE: The therapist may explore a client’s early relationships, encourage the client to adopt new ways of thinking, or coach the client in replacing old behaviors with new ones.
Biomedical therapy
Offers medications and other biological treatments.
EXAMPLE: A person with severe depression may receive antidepressants, electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT), or deep-brain stimulation.
Eclectic
Using a blend of therapies.
(Sigmund Freud’s) Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic technique used in treating psychological disorders. Freud believed the patient’s free associations, resistances, dreams, and transferences—and the therapist’s interpretations of them—released previously repressed feelings, allowing the patient to gain self-insight.
Free Association
You begin by relaxing, perhaps by lying on a couch. The psychoanalyst, who sits out of your line of vision, asks you to say aloud whatever comes to mind. At one moment, you’re relating a childhood memory. At another, you’re describing a dream or recent experience. It sounds easy, but soon you notice how often you edit your thoughts as you speak. You pause for a second before uttering an embarrassing thought.
Resistance
In psychoanalysis, the blocking from the consciousness of anxiety-laden material.
Interpretation
in psychoanalysis, the analyst note supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviors and events in order to promote insight.
Transferring
in psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent).
Psychodynamic Therapists
Views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and seeks to enhance self-insight.
Psychodynamic therapists aim to help people gain insight into unconscious dynamics that arise from their life experiences.
Psychodynamic therapists expect people’s problems to diminish as they gain insight into their unresolved and unconscious tensions.
Psychodynamic therapists instead work on resolving unconscious conflicts stemming from childhood.
Jonathan Shedler (2009)
“We can have loving feelings and hateful feelings toward the same person,” noted the psychodynamic therapist.
Humanistic therapists
Focuses on a person’s individual nature, rather than categorizing groups of people with similar characteristics as having the same problems.
The present and future are more important than the past. Therapy thus focuses on exploring feelings as they occur, rather than on achieving insights into the childhood origins of those feelings.
Humanistic therapists expect problems to diminish as people get in touch with their feelings.
Insight therapies
Therapies aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defenses.
The insight therapies assume that self-awareness and psychological well-being go hand in hand.
Carl Rogers (1902–1987)
He developed a humanistic technique called client-centered therapy.
Client-Centered Therapy
The therapist uses techniques such as active listening within an accepting, genuine, empathic environment to facilitate clients’ growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.)
Unconditional Positive Regard
A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients develop self-awareness and self-acceptance.
How can we improve communication in our own relationships by listening more actively?
Paraphrase: Check your understanding by summarizing the person’s words out loud, in your own words.
Invite clarification: “What might be an example of that?” may encourage the person to say more.
Reflect feelings: “It sounds frustrating” might mirror what you’re sensing from the person’s body language and intensity.
Behavior therapists
Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviors.
It doubts the healing power of self-awareness.
Behavior therapists acknowledge that conditioned responses may result from childhood experiences
Classical Conditioning Techniques
EXAMPLE: O. H. Mowrer developed a successful conditioning therapy for chronic bed-wetters, using a liquid-sensitive pad connected to an alarm. If the sleeping child wets the bed pad, moisture triggers the alarm, waking the child. After a number of trials, the child associates bladder relaxation with waking. In three out of four cases, the treatment has been effective and the success boosted the child’s self-image.
Counterconditioning
behavior therapy procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviors; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.
Mary Cover Jones
Behavioral psychologist.
Working with 3-year-old Peter, who is petrified of rabbits and other furry objects. To rid Peter of his fear, Jones plans to associate the fear-evoking rabbit with the pleasurable, relaxed response associated with eating. As Peter begins his midafternoon snack, she introduces a caged rabbit on the other side of the huge room. Peter, eagerly munching away on his crackers and drinking his milk, hardly notices.
Exposure Therapies
Therapies treat anxieties by exposing people (in imaginary or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.
Systematic Desensitization
A type of exposure therapy that associates a pleasant relaxed state with gradually increasing anxiety-triggering stimuli. Commonly used to treat phobias.
Progressive Relaxation
You would learn to release tension in one muscle group after another until you achieve a comfortable, complete relaxation.
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.
A counterconditioning technique that treats anxiety through creative electronic simulations in which people can safely face their greatest fears, such as airplane flying, spiders, or public speaking. (
Aversive Conditioning
Creates a negative (aversive) response to a harmful stimulus (such as alcohol). It helps you to learn what you should not do.
B. F. Skinner
Helped us understand the basic principle of operant conditioning: Consequences strongly influence our voluntary behaviors.
Token Economy
An operant conditioning procedure in which people earn a token for exhibiting the desired behavior and can later exchange tokens for privileges or treats.
Cognitive Therapies
Therapy that teaches people new, more adaptive ways of thinking; based on the assumption that thoughts intervene between events and our emotional reactions.
Albert Ellis (1962, 1987, 1993)
The creator of rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT), states many problems arise from irrational thinking.
Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)
Vigorously challenges people’s illogical, self-defeating attitudes and assumptions.
Placebo Effect
A sham substance or treatment which is designed to have no therapeutic value.
Common placebos include inert tablets, inert injections, sham surgery, and other procedures.
Evidence-based practice
Integrates the best available research with clinicians’ expertise and patients’ characteristics, preferences, and circumstances.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
A psychotherapy treatment that was originally designed to alleviate the distress associated with traumatic memories.
Therapy for PTSD, though possibly for reasons unrelated to eye movements.
Light exposure therapy
Seem to help those with a seasonal pattern in their depression symptoms by activating a brain region that influences arousal and hormones.
Therapeutic Alliance
A measure of the therapist’s and client’s mutual engagement in the work of therapy
Psychopharmacology
The study of drug effects on mind and behavior, has helped make drug therapy the most widely used biomedical therapy.
Antipsychotic drugs
- Used in treating schizophrenia.
- Block dopamine activity.
- Side effects may include tardive dyskinesia (with involuntary movements of facial muscles, tongue, and limbs).
- Increased risk of obesity and diabetes.
Antianxiety drugs
Which depress central nervous system activity.
- Used to treat anxiety disorders
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Posttraumatic stress disorder
- These drugs can be physically and psychologically addictive.
Antidepressant drugs
- Increase the availability of serotonin
- Increase the availability of norepinephrine
- Used for depression, often with modest effectiveness beyond that of placebo drugs
- The antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are now used to treat other disorders
- Used for strokes
- Used for anxiety disorders
- Used for obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Used for posttraumatic stress disorder
Lithium
Mood stabilizer prescribed for those with bipolar disorder.
Depakote (deh·pu·kaat)
Mood stabilizer prescribed for those with bipolar disorder.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)
A brief electric current is sent through the brain of an anesthetized patient, is an effective treatment for people with severe depression who have not responded to other therapy.
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)
is a non-invasive, painless brain stimulation treatment that uses direct electrical currents to stimulate specific parts of the brain.
Several studies suggest it may be a valuable tool for the treatment of neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and chronic pain.
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS)
Newer alternative treatments for depression.
Psychosurgery
Removes or destroys brain tissue in hopes of modifying behavior.
Radical psychosurgical procedures such as the lobotomy were once popular, but neurosurgeons now rarely perform brain surgery to change behavior or moods.
