Week 1 - Researching distress and mental health.

Question 1

family aggregation

Answer 1

that is, whether a disorder runs in families.

Question 2

Is there a universal agreement about what is meant by abnormality or disor-der?

Answer 2

No

Question 3

Difficulties in which 7 areas may suggest some form of mental disorder

Answer 3

• Subjective distress
  (neither sufficient nor necessary for mental disorder)
• Maladaptiveness
  (distinction between maladaptive towards self vs towards others - unfortunately, at least the ‘towards self’ version is defined in the economic-paradigm)
• Statistical Deviancy
  (Value-laden. Something isn’t termed ‘abnormal’ when it is statistically rare, but when it is also undesirable)
• Violation of the standards of society
  (Although many social rules are arbitrary to some extent, when people fail to follow the conven-tional social and moral rules of their cultural group, we may consider their behavior abnormal. But depends on magnitude.)
• Social discomfort
  (At times a measure of abnormal behaviour)
• Irrationality and unpredictability
• Dangerousness

Question 4

Within DSM-5, a mental disorder is defined as

Answer 4

a syndrome that is present in an individual and that involves clinically significant disturbance in behavior, emotion regulation, or cognitive functioning.

Question 5

nomenclature

Answer 5

a naming system

Question 6

Pros and cons of classification (4 and 2)

Answer 6

Pros

• Nomenclature helps with ease of communication
• Structure of information
• Facilitates research
• Helps with related formal processes (welfare, insurance what is deemed worthy of psychological help)

Cons

• Loss of information
• Stigma associated with label

Question 7

Epidemiology is the study of

Answer 7

the distribution of diseases, disorders, or health-related behaviors in a given population.

Question 8

The term prevalence refers to

Answer 8

the number of active cases in a population during any given period of time. Prevalence figures are typically expressed as percentages

Question 9

Point prevalence refers to the

Answer 9

estimated proportion of actual, active cases of a disorder in a given population at a given point in time.

Question 10

lifetime prevalence estimate.

Answer 10

Extend over an entire lifetime and include both currently ill and recovered individuals. They therefore tend to be higher than other kinds of prevalence estimates.

Question 11

incidence

Answer 11

This refers to the number of new cases that occur over a given period of time (typically 1 year)

Question 12

Relationship between different estimates (using parentheses)

Answer 12

Prevelence(lifetime prevalence estimate(incidence(point prevelence)))

Question 13

Comorbidity

Answer 13

is the term used to describe the presence of two or more disor-ders in the same person.

Question 14

acute

Answer 14

short in duration

Question 15

chronic

Answer 15

long in duration

Question 16

sampling

Answer 16

An attempt to get a representative sample of people who are drawn from this underlying population (e.g. those with panic attacks).

Question 17

“samples of convenience”

Answer 17

study groups of people who are easily accessible to researchers and who are readily available.

Question 18

external validity

Answer 18

The extent to which we can generalize our findings beyond the study itself

Question 19

internal validity

Answer 19

reflects how confident we can be in the results of a particular given study. In other words, internal validity is the extent to which a study is methodologically sound, free of confounds or other sources of error, and able to be used to draw valid conclusions

Question 20

comparison group (sometimes called a control group).

Answer 20

This may be defined as a group of people who do not exhibit the disor-der being studied but who are comparable in all other major respects to the criterion group (i.e., people with the disorder being studied).

Question 21

standard treatment comparison study

Answer 21

alternative research design may be called for in which two (or more) treatments are compared in differing yet comparable groups

Question 22

single-case research designs

Answer 22

Case studies used to develop and test therapy techniques within a scientific framework.

Question 23

ABAB design

Answer 23

-The first A phase serves as a baseline condition.
-the first B phase, we introduce our treatment.
-withdraw the treatment and see what happens.
-reinstate our treatment and see if the behav-ioral changes we saw in the first B phase become apparent again.

Question 24

moral management

Answer 24

a wide-ranging method of treatment that focused on a patient’s social, individual, and occupational needs—became relatively widespread.

Question 25

deinstitutionalization,

Answer 25

the move away from psychiatric hospitals towards integrated home-based care

Question 26

four major advances in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that changed the way that abnormal behavior was viewed and treated:

Answer 26

(1) biological discoveries,
(2) the development of an agreed-upon classification system for mental disorders,
(3) the emergence of scientifically informed views about the causes of abnormal behaviour, and
(4) the emergence of experimental psychology

Question 27

When studying this, review pages 73-74 for recap of historical figures.