ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY NOTES PART ONE COMPLETE LATEST 2024/2025, Exams of Psychology

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ABNORMAL

PSYCHOLOGY

NOTES PART

ONE COMPLETE

LATEST

Learning Outcomes

Psychology 435: Abnormal Psychology has eleven major learning outcomes. When you have completed this course, you should be able to:

1. Describe the historical emergence of abnormal psychology as a concept and as an area of clinical practice.
2. Identify and compare several theories about the causes of abnormal behaviour.
3. Discuss issues in the assessment and diagnosis of mental disorders.
4. Describe the wide variety of treatment approaches available to modern clinicians.
5. Identify and describe several common and relatively easily treated disorders, such as adjustment, anxiety, phobias, and somatoform disorders.
6. Identify and describe the more difficult-to-treat disorders, such as schizophrenia, paranoia, and the affective disorders.
7. Describe and discuss disorders that involve some violation of legal or social standards, including sexual variations, alcohol and drug abuse patterns, impulse control, and violence.
8. Recognize relationships between various central nervous system impairments and abnormal behaviour patterns.
9. Explain the aspects and implications of various types and levels of neurodevelopmental disorders.
10. Identify, describe, and discuss special disorders of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and aging.

mental functioning. DSM-5 also recognizes that mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in key areas of functioning such as social, occupational, or other activities. Predictable or culturally approved responses to common stressors or losses (such as death of a loved one) are

excluded. It is also important that this dysfunctional pattern of behavior not stem from social deviance or conflicts that the person has with society as a whole.

- Within a given culture, many shared beliefs and behaviors exist that are widely accepted and that may constitute one or more customary practices.

4. Identify how culture can influence the definition of Abnormal Psychology. - Labeling, stigma and stereotyping - Number 13 in Christian countries vs Number 4 in Japan - Culture can shape the clinical presentation of disorders like depression, which are present in cultures around the world. Cultural interpretation and expression of abnormal psychology is not known well. - A case in point is taijin kyofusho. This syndrome, which is an anxiety disorder, is quite prevalent in Japan. It involves a marked fear that one’s body, body parts, or body functions may offend, embarrass, or otherwise make others feel uncomfortable. Often, people with this dis-order are afraid of blushing or upsetting others by their gaze, facial expression, or body odor. - Latino descent, ataque de nervios or an “attack of nerves” is a clinical syndrome that does not seem to correspond to any specific diagnosis within the DSM. Triggered by stressful event, symptoms are crying, trembling and uncontrollable screaming, sense of being out of control, can be physically or verbally aggressive, faint or have a seizure-like fit but then can return to normal as if nothing happened.
5. Identify the professionals responsible for working on the mental health “team.” - Psychiatrist: prescribe medications and monitors for side effects - Clinical Psychologist: individual therapy meeting with patient several times a week - Clinical Social Worker: helps patient resolve family problems. - Psychiatric Nurse: checks daily to provide support and help cope better in hospital setting. - Team of professionals can be different in outpatient. Can be just the psychiatrist (medication and psychotherapy) but some receive meds from the psychiatrist but go see a psychologist or a clinical social worker for therapy. Some see a counseling psychologist, a psychoanalyst, or a counsellor.
6. Explain the difference between the prevalence and the incidence of mental disorders. - Epidemiology: the study of the distribution of diseases, disorders, or health- related behaviours in a given population. Mental health epidemiology is the study of the distribution of mental disorders. - Prevalence: the number of active cases in a population during any given period of time. Percentages of the population that has the disorder, etc. - Point prevalence: the estimated proportion of actual, active cases of a

study and count the number of people who have major depressive disorder (i.e., clinical depression) on January 1 of next year, this would provide us with a point prevalence estimate of active cases of depression.

- 1 - year prevalence figure: count everyone who experienced the disorder at any point in time throughout the entire year. - Lifetime prevalence: an estimate of the number of people who have had a particular disorder at anytime in their lives (even if recovered). - Incidence: the number of new cases that occur over a given period of time (typically one year).

7. Discuss the prevalent rates of mental disorders. **-

-** Comorbidity: presence of two or more disorders in the same person, higher in severe disorders.

8. Explain inpatient and outpatient treatment. - Outpatient treatment requires that a patient visit a mental health facility practitioner, but the patient does not have to be admitted or stay overnight. A patient may attend a community mental health center, see a private therapist, or receive treatment through the outpatient department of a hospital. - Hospitalization and inpatient care are preferred for those needing more intensive care. Deinstitutionalization.
9. Describe and explain the benefits and dimensions of the various research approaches. - Acute: short in duration - Chronic: long in duration - Etiology: causes of disorders - Case Studies: can be subject to bias because the writer decides what they include. Low generalizability: they cannot be used to draw conclusions about other cases even if it is similar. Conclusions can be narrow and mistaken. Can illustrate clinical material. Limited support for a particular theory or provide some negative evidence that can challenge a prevailing idea or assumption. - Self-Report Data: This might involve having our research participants complete questionnaires of various types. Another way of collecting self- report data is from interviews. The researcher asks a series of questions and then records what the person says. Misleading, people might not report themselves well, lying, misinterpreting the question, desire to present themselves as favorable, not always accurate or truthful. - Observational Approaches: depends on what we are trying to see. We can use direct observation, for example having trained observers record the number of times children who are classified as being aggressive hit, bite, push, punch or kick playmates. Might also look at biological variants (heart rate) as well as hormones etc. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining (fMRI) used to study the working brain and can study blood flow to various parts. There is also Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) which generates a magnetic field on the surface of the head where we can stimulate underlying brain tissue. Painless and non- invasive while a person is sitting. Using TMS, we can even take a particular area of the brain “off-line” for a few seconds and measure the behavioral consequences. In short, we can now collect observational data that would have been impossible to obtain in the past.
10. Describe the process of doing research. - Generate a hypothesis (an effort to explain, predict or explore something), which is normally tested. Design studies to help them approach an understanding of this. - Sampling: try to select people who are representative of the much larger

- Samples of convenience: study groups of people who are easily accessible to them and are readily available. - External validity: the extent to which we can generalize our findings beyond the study. - Internal Validity: reflects how confident we can be in the results of a particular given study; 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. - Comparison group (control group) is used to test hypotheses, group of people who do not exhibit the disorder being studies but who are comparable in other major respects to the criterion group (people with the disorder being studied). - Correlational research: involves studying the world as it is, does not involve manipulation of variables. Researcher selects certain groups of interest and compares the groups on a variety of different measures. - Positive correlation vs negative correlation (inverse correlation) vs uncorrelation - Correlation coefficient: denoted by symbol r. Correlation runs from 0 - 1. + and – represents the direction of association. Positive means higher scores on one variable are associated with higher scores on another. Negative means as scores on one go up, the other goes down. - Statistical significance: the probability that the correlation would occur purely by chance is less than 5 out of 100 (p<.05) - Effect size: reflects the size of the association between the variables. - Meta-analysis: a statistical approach that calculate and then combines the effect sizes from all the studies. - CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION. - Third variable problem: To use an example from abnormal psychology, it was once thought that masturbation caused insanity. This hypothesis no doubt arose from the fact that, historically, patients in mental asylums could often be seen masturbating in full view of others. Of course, we now know that masturbation and insanity were correlated not because masturbation caused insanity but because sane people are much more likely to masturbate in private than in public. In other words, the key factor linking the insanity and masturbation (and the unmeasured third variable) was that of impaired social awareness. - Retrospective research: looking back in time, collect info about how patients lived before which could be associated with what went wrong later. - Prospective research: looking ahead in time, focus on people before the disorder manifests. - Longitudinal design: study that follows people over time and that tries to identify factors that predate the onset of a disorder. - Direction of effect problem: correlational research does not allow us to draw any conclusions about directionality. - Experimental research:

- Independent variable: one manipulated

of intellectual activity and mental disorders were due to brain pathology. Emphasizes brain injuries can cause sensory and motor disorders. 3 mental disorder categories: mania, melancholia, and phrenitis (brain fever) Four elements were earth, air, fire and water which contribute to head, cold, moistness and dryness. These elements combined to form four essential fluids of the body: blood (sanguis), phlegm, bile (choler), and black bile (melancholic). This brought one of the earliest and longest lasting typologies of the human behaviour: the sanguine, the phlegmatic, the choleric and the melancholic. Dreams were important. Basic concept of modern psychodynamic psychotherapy. Melancholia treatment: regular and tranquil life, sobriety and abstinence from all excesses, a vegetable diet, celibacy, exercise short of fatigue, and bleeding if indicated, removal of patients from family. Plato

- Plato shared the belief that mental disorders were in part divinely caused. - Asclepiages - Theory of disease based on the flow of atoms through the pores in the body and came up with treatments such as massage, special diets, bathing, exercise, listening to music, and rest and quiet, to restore to the body. - Galen - Anatomy of the nervous system. Scientific approach to the field, dividing the causes of psychological disorders into physical and mental categories. Among the causes he named were injuries to the head, excessive use of alcohol, shock, fear, adolescence, menstrual changes, economic reversals, and disappointment in love. - Contrariis contrarius: opposite by opposite (ex. Chilled wine while in a warm tub)

3. Discuss how mental disorders were viewed during the Middle Ages. - First mental hospital in Baghdad in A.D 792 and in these hospitals, the patients were treated humanely. Avincenna referred to hysteria, epilepsy, manic reactions and melancholia most (ex. Prince thinking he was a cow). - During the Middle Ages in Europe, scientific inquiry into abnormal behavior was limited, and the treatment of individuals who were psychologically disturbed was characterized more often by ritual or superstition than by attempts to understand an individual’s condition. - Mass Madness: the widespread occurrence of group behaviour disorders that were apparently cases of hysteria, this was simultaneous (dancing etc.) - Tarantism: a disorder that included an uncontrollable impulse to dance was often attributed to the bite of the southern European tarantula or wolf spider. Also known as Saint Vitus’s Dance in Europe - Lycanthropy: a condition in which people believed themselves to be possessed by wolves and imitated their behaviour.

- Koro: southeast Asia, dear of genital retraction accompanied by a fear of death. - Exorcism and Witchcraft: treatment consisted of prayer, holy water, sanctified ointments, visits to holy places and mild forms of exorcism. “For a fiend-sick

- Philippe Pinel: La Bicetre in France. Allowed to take chains of patients to test his views that patients with mental illness should be treated with kindness and consideration, as sick people not beasts or criminals. Results were order and peace. - William Tuke: York Retreat. A pleasant country house where people with mental illnesses lived, worked, and rested in a kindly, religious atmosphere. In 1842 the Lunacy Inquiry Act was passed: included a requirement that asylyms and houses be effectively inspected every 4 months to ensure proper diet and the elimination of the use of restraints. In 1845 the Country Asylums Act was passed in England which required every county to provide asylum to paupers and lunatics and the Britain policy was expanded to colonies. - In Kingston, people were dealt by “tanking” which meant lunatics were routinely held under water in a bathing tank by nurses and sometimes other patients until near death. - Benjamin Rush and America: Pennsylvania Hospital. He encouraged more human treatment and was basically the founder of psychiatry. Invented and used the “tranquilizing chair,” which was more torturous than tranquil. Thought to lessen the force of the blood on the head while the muscles were relaxed. - Moral Management: a wide-ranging method of treatment that focused on a patient’s social, individual, and occupational needs. Mostly rehab on their character in asylums. - Mental Hygiene Movement: advocated a method of treatment that focused almost exclusively on the physical well-being of hospitalized patients with mental illness. - Benjamin Franklin was one of the earliest explorers of electric shock to treat mental illness (accidental). He did this because he saw that electric shock changed memories and used this to try to cure depression. - Dorothea Dix and Mental Hygiene Movement: Dix is credited with establishing 32 mental hospitals and improved conditions in hospitals. - Psychiatrists were known as alienists/medical professionals. - Mental deterioration or shattered nerves supposedly resulted from a persons using up previous nerve force came to be referred to as neurasthenia which was a condition that involved pervasive feelings of low mood, lack of energy, and physical symptoms. - Paresis: syphilis of the brain. - Medications were developed. The use of lithium in the treatment of manic- depressive disorders. The introduction of phenothiazines for the treatment of schizophrenia. - Medications were developed and they began to introduce people back into society. Chlorpromazine: alleviate psychotic symptoms. Many hospitals closed and there was a significant reduction in state and county mental hospital populations and this movement was referred to as deinstitutionalization. Many of these people, however, were sent to other places and only few were sent back to their homes. The problems caused by deinstitutionalization appear to be due, in no small part,

to the failure of society to develop ways to fill the gaps in mental health services in the community.

8. Explain how both the discovery of a biological basis for general paresis and a handful of other disorders (such as the senile mental disorders, toxic mental disorders, and certain types of mental retardation) contributed in a major way to the development of a scientific approach to abnormal psychology, as well as to the emergence of modern experimental science which was largely biological. - General Paresis and Syphilis: Bayle differentiated general paresis as a specific type of mental disorder. Then, Richard von Krafft-Ebing conducted experiments involving the inoculation of patients with paresis with matter from syphilitic sores. None developed secondary symptoms of syphilis which meant they were previously infected. Then August von Wassermann devised a blood test for syphilis, and this could detect bacteria before infection appeared. Lastly, Julius von Wagner-Jauregg introduced malarial fever treatment of syphilis and paresis because he knew high fever associated with malaria killed off the bacteria. Now we use penicillin. - Albrecht von Haller: emphasized the important of the brain in psychic functions and advocated postmortem dissection to study the brains of the insane. Griesinger then wrote about it and said that all mental disorders could be explained in terms of brain pathology. Henry Cotton then said that mental health problems such as schizophrenia could be cured by removing the infections that he believed caused the condition. Walkter Freeman (following Egas Moniz) started to treat severe mental disorders using lobotomies. He used an ice pick to sever the neural connections in the brain after entering through the patient’s eye sockets. - Just because it told the how, does not mean it told the why.
9. Distinguish between biological and non-biological versions of medical model thinking about psychopathology. - Biological Basis: Emil Kraepelin; biological viewpoints, his book emphasized the importance of brain pathology in mental disorders but also made several related contributions that helped establish this viewpoint. He made a classification system (forerunner of today’s DSM classification). - Dopamine hypothesis: the metabolism of dopamine is associated with the cause of schizophrenia. - Psychological Basis: Sigmund Freud Psychoanalytic Perspective: comprehensive theory of psychopathology that emphasized the inner dynamics of unconscious motives (psychodynamics) are at the heart of this. The methods he used to study and treat patients were called psychoanalysis. Hypnosis: an induced state of relaxation in which a person is highly open to suggestion.

feelings, motives and so forth) and dream analysis (patients record and describe their dreams). These

techniques helped analysts and patients gain insights and achieve a better understanding of the patients’ emotional problems.

13. List the major features of the behavioural perspective. - Behavioral psychologists believed that the study of subjective experience (through the techniques of free association and dream analysis) did not provide acceptable scientific data because such observations were not open to verification by other investigators. In their view, only the study of directly observable behavior—and the stimuli and reinforcing conditions that “control” it—could serve as a basis for formulating scientific principles of human behavior. - Central theme: the role of learning in human behaviour.
14. Discriminate between classical and operant conditioning. - Classical: a form of learning in which a neutral stimulus is paired repeatedly with an unconditioned stimulus that naturally elicits an unconditioned behaviour. After repeated pairings, the neutral stimulus becomes conditioned stimulus that elicits a conditioned response. Pavlov and his dogs. - Watson used this to make an approach known as behaviourism (the focus of psychology changed to the study of overt behaviour rather than the study of theoretical mentalistic constructs). Watson’s approach placed heavy emphasis on the role of the social environment in conditioning personality development and behavior, both normal and abnormal. - Operant: Thorndike and Skinner explored this, and it is one in which the consequences of behaviour influence behaviour. Behavior that operates on the environment may be instrumental in producing certain outcomes, and those out- comes, in turn, determine the likelihood that the behavior will be repeated on similar occasions. Ex. Cats and pulling a chain. Was known as instrumental conditioning prior.
15. Explain the problems associated with interpreting historical events. - Historical Misinformation: could be exaggerated or distorted. - Reinterpretation - Cannot reply on direct observation. - Viewing out of context, don’t know if there are ulterior motives, bias.