Download Chapter 13: Psychological Disorders Abnormal Behavior: The

Chapter 13: Psychological Disorders
Abnormal Behavior: The medical model
What is abnormal behavior?
 Deviant
 Maladaptive
 Causing personal distress
Psychodiagnosis: The Classification of Disorders
 American Psychiatric Association
 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – 4th ed.
(DSM - 4)
Five Axes
Axis I – Clinical Syndromes
Axis II – Personality Disorders or Mental Retardation
Axis III – General Medical Conditions
Axis IV – Psychosocial and Environmental Problems
Axis V – Global Assessment of Functioning
Anxiety Disorders
Generalized anxiety disorder
 “free-floating anxiety”
Phobic disorder
 Specific focus of fear
Panic disorder and agoraphobia
Obsessive compulsive disorder
 Obsessions
 Compulsions
Mangefrida PSY101 Chapter 13
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Etiology of Anxiety Disorders
Biological factors
 Genetic predisposition
 GABA circuits in the brain
Conditioning and learning
 Acquired through classical
conditioning
 Maintained through operant
conditioning
Cognitive factors
 Judgments of perceived
threat
Stress—a precipitator
Mangefrida PSY101 Chapter 13
Somatoform Disorders
 Physical ailments that cannot be fully explained by organic
conditions and are largely due to psychological factors
Somatization Disorder
 Marked by a history of diverse physical complaints that
appear to be psychological in origin
Conversion Disorder
 Characterized by a significant loss of physical function (with
no apparent organic basis)
Hypochondriasis
 Hypochondria
 Characterized by excessive preoccupation with one’s health
and incessant worry about developing physical illnesses
Etiology of somatoform disorders
 Cognitive factors
 Personality factors
 The sick role
Dissociative Disorders
 A class of disorders in which people lose contact with portions
of their consciousness or memory, resulting in disruptions in
their sense of identity.
Dissociative Amnesia
 A sudden loss of memory for important personal information
that is too extensive to be due to normal forgetting
Dissociative Fugue
 When a person lose their memory for their entire lives along
with their sense of personal identity
Mangefrida PSY101 Chapter 13
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)
 Involves the coexistence in one person of two or more largely
complete, and usually very different, personalities
Etiology
 Stress
 Severe emotional trauma during childhood
Controversy
Media creation?
Mood Disorders
 A class of disorders marked by emotional disturbances of
varied kinds that may spill over to disrupt physical, perceptual,
social and thought processes
Major Depressive Disorder
 Dysthymic disorder
 People show persistent feelings of sadness and despair and
loss of interest in previous sources of pleasure
Bipolar Disorder
 Cyclothymic disorder
 Marked by experience of both depressed ans manic periods
Etiology
 Genetic vulnerability
 Neurochemical factors
 Cognitive factors
 Interpersonal roots
 Precipitating stress
Mangefrida PSY101 Chapter 13
Schizophrenia
 Encompass a class of disorders marked by delusions,
hallucinations, disorganized speech, and deterioration of adaptive
behavior
General symptoms
 Delusions and irrational thought
 Deterioration of adaptive behavior
 Distorted perception
 Disturbed emotion

Subtyping of Schizophrenia
Four subtypes
 Paranoid type
 Catatonic type
 Disorganized type
 Undifferentiated type
New model for classification
 Positive vs. negative
symptoms
Etiology of Schizophrenia
 Genetic vulnerability
 Neurochemical factors
 Structural abnormalities of the brain
 The neurodevelopmental hypothesis
 Expressed emotion
 Precipitating stress
Mangefrida PSY101 Chapter 13
Culture and Pathology
 Abnormal syndromes found only in a few cultural groups
Cultural variations
Culture bound disorders
 Koro – an obsessive fear that one’s penis will withdraw into one’s
abdomen
o Only seen in Chinese males in Malaya
 Windigo – intense craving for human flesh and fear that one will
turn into a cannibal
o Only seen among Algonquin Indians
 Anorexia nervosa – intense fear of becoming fat
o Seen exclusively in affluent Western cultures
Mangefrida PSY101 Chapter 13