UNIT #8 : Clinical Psychology

Question 1

Psychological disorder

Answer 1

A syndrome marked by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behaviour.

Question 2

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)

Answer 2

A psychological disorder marked by the appearance by age 7 of one or more of three key symptoms: extreme inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.

Question 3

Medical model

Answer 3

The concept that diseases, in this case psychological disorders, have physical causes that can be diagnosed, treated, and, in most cases, cured, often through treatment in a hospital.

Question 4

DSM-5

Answer 4

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition; a widely used system for classifying psychological disorders.

Question 5

Anxiety disorders

Answer 5

Psychological disorders characterized by distressing, persistent anxiety or maladaptive behaviours that reduce anxiety.

Question 6

Generalized anxiety disorder

Answer 6

An anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal

Question 7

Panic disorder

Answer 7

An anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations. Often followed by worry over a possible next attack.

Question 8

Phobia

Answer 8

An anxiety disorder marked by a persistent, irrational fear and avoidance of a specific object, activity, or situation.

Question 9

Social anxiety disorder

Answer 9

Intense fear of social situations, leading to avoidance of such. (Formerly called social phobia.)

Question 10

Agoraphobia

Answer 10

Fear or avoidance of situations, such as crowds or wide open places, where one has felt loss of control and panic.

Question 11

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

Answer 11

A disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions) and/or actions (compulsions).

Question 12

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Answer 12

A disorder characterized by haunting memories, nightmares, social withdrawal, jumpy anxiety, numbness of feeling, and/or insomnia that lingers for four weeks or more after a traumatic experience.

Question 13

Post traumatic growth

Answer 13

Positive psychological changes as a result of struggling with extremely challenging circumstances and life crises.

Question 14

Mood disorders

Answer 14

Psychological disorders characterized by emotional extremes. See major depressive disorder, mania, and bipolar disorder.

Question 15

Major depressive disorder

Answer 15

A mood disorder in which a person experiences, in the absence of drugs or another medical condition, two or more weeks with five or more symptoms, at least one of which must be either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure.

Question 16

Mania

Answer 16

A mood disorder marked by a hyperactive, wildly optimistic state

Question 17

Bipolar disorder

Answer 17

A mood disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania. (Formerly called manic-depressive disorder.)

Question 18

Schizophrenia

Answer 18

A psychological disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished or inappropriate emotional expression.

Question 19

Psychosis

Answer 19

A psychological disorder in which a person loses contact with reality, experiencing irrational ideas and distorted perceptions.

Question 20

Delusions

Answer 20

False beliefs, often of persecution or grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders.

Question 21

Hallucination

Answer 21

False sensory experience, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus.

Question 22

Rumination

Answer 22

Compulsive fretting; overthinking about our problems and their causes.

Question 23

Somatic symptom disorder

Answer 23

A psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause. (See conversion disorder and illness anxiety disorder.)

Question 24

Conversion disorder

Answer 24

A disorder in which a person experiences very specific genuine physical symptoms for which no physiological basis can be found. (Also called functional neurological symptom disorder.)

Question 25

Illness anxiety disorder

Answer 25

A disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease. (Formerly called hypochondriasis.)

Question 26

Dissociative disorders

Answer 26

Disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings.

Question 27

Dissociative identity disorder (DID)

Answer 27

A rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder.

Question 28

Anorexia nervosa

Answer 28

An eating disorder in which a person (usually an adolescent female) maintains a starvation diet despite being significantly (15 percent or more) underweight.

Question 29

Bulimia nervosa

Answer 29

An eating disorder in which a person alternates binge eating (usually of high-calorie foods) with purging (by vomiting or laxative use), excessive exercise, or fasting

Question 30

Binge-eating disorder

Answer 30

Significant binge-eating episodes, followed by distress, disgust, or guilt, but without the compensatory purging or fasting that marks bulimia nervosa.

Question 31

Personality disorders

Answer 31

Psychological disorders characterized by inflexible and enduring behaviour patterns that impair social functioning.

Question 32

Antisocial personality disorder

Answer 32

A personality disorder in which a person (usually a man) exhibits a lack of conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family members. May be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist.

Question 33

Psychotherapy

Answer 33

Treatment involving psychological techniques; consists
of interactions between a trained therapist and someone seeking to overcome psychological difficulties or achieve personal growth.

Question 34

Biomedical therapy

Answer 34

Prescribed medications or procedures that act directly on the person’s physiology.

Question 35

Eclectic approach

Answer 35

An approach to psychotherapy that, depending on the client’s problems, uses techniques from various forms of therapy

Question 36

Psychoanalysis

Answer 36

Sigmund Freud’s therapeutic technique. 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.

Question 37

Resistance

Answer 37

In psychoanalysis, the blocking from consciousness of anxiety-laden material.

Question 38

Interpretation

Answer 38

In psychoanalysis, the analyst’s noting supposed dream meanings, resistances, and other significant behaviours and events in order to promote insight.

Question 39

Transference

Answer 39

In psychoanalysis, the patient’s transfer to the analyst of emotions linked with other relationships (such as love or hatred for a parent).

Question 40

Psychodynamic therapy

Answer 40

Therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight.

Question 41

Insight therapies

Answer 41

A variety of therapies that aim to improve psychological functioning by increasing a person’s awareness of underlying motives and defences.

Question 42

Client-centered therapy

Answer 42

A humanistic therapy, developed
by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients’ growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.)

Question 43

active listening

Answer 43

Empathic listening in which the listener echoes, restates, and clarifies. A feature of Rogers’s client-centered therapy.

Question 44

Unconditional positive regard

Answer 44

A caring, accepting, nonjudgmental attitude, which Carl Rogers believed would help clients to develop self- awareness and self-acceptance.

Question 45

Behaviour therapy

Answer 45

Therapy that applies learning principles to the elimination of unwanted behaviours

Question 46

Counterconditioning behaviour therapy

Answer 46

Procedures that use classical conditioning to evoke new responses to stimuli that are triggering unwanted behaviours; include exposure therapies and aversive conditioning.

Question 47

Exposure therapies

Answer 47

Behavioural techniques, such as systematic desensitization and virtual reality exposure therapy, that treat anxieties by exposing people (in imagination or actual situations) to the things they fear and avoid.