AP Psych Unit 8 Part 1: Abnormal Behavior

Environmental Triggers for Schizophrenia

- "No environmental causes have been discovered that will invariably, or even with moderate probability, produce schizophrenia in persons who are not related to" a person with schizophrenia. - Warning signs include social withdrawal, a mother with schizophrenia, birth implications, separations from parents, short attention span and poor muscle coordination, disruptive or withdrawn behavior, emotional unpredictability and abuse

Defining Psychological Disorders

- A psychological disorder is a syndrome marked by a "clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior" - Such thoughts, emotions, or behaviors are dysfunctional or maladaptive—they interfere with normal day-to-day life. From 1952 through December 9, 1973, homosexuality was classified as a psychological disorder. By day's end on December 10, it was not. The APA made this change because more and more of its members no longer viewed same-sex attraction as a psychological problem

Understanding DID

- Abnormal brain anatomy and activity can accompany DID - Brain scans show shrinkage in areas that aid memory and detection of threat - Heightened activity appears in brain areas associated with the control and inhibition of traumatic memories - Both the psychodynamic and learning perspectives have interpreted DID symptoms as ways of coping with anxiety. - Some psychodynamic theorists see them as defenses against the anxiety caused by the eruption of unacceptable impulses. In this view, a second personality enables the discharge of forbidden impulses. - Some clinicians include dissociative disorders under the umbrella of posttraumatic stress disorder - sexual abuse is common among DID patients

Genetic Influences

- Depressive disorders and bipolar disorder run in families. - If one identical twin is diagnosed with major depressive disorder, the chances are about 1 in 2 that at some time the other twin will be, too. If one identical twin has bipolar disorder, the chances of a similar diagnosis for the co-twin are even higher—7 in 10—even for twins raised apart - One research team estimated the heritability of major depressive disorder—the extent to which individual differences are attributable to genes—at 40 percent - To tease out the genes that put people at risk for depression, some researchers have turned to linkage analysis - First, geneticists find families in which the disorder appears across several generations. Next, the researchers examine DNA from affected and unaffected family members, looking for differences - Linkage analysis points them to a chromosome neighborhood - Many genes work in conjunction to produce depression

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

- Diet, drugs, stress, and other environmental influences lay down epigenetic marks, molecular genetic tags that can turn certain genes on or off. - The social-cognitive perspective explores how people's assumptions and expectations influence what they perceive. - Many depressed people view life through the dark glasses of low self esteem - Expecting the worst, depressed people's self-defeating beliefs and their negative explanatory style feed their depression.

UNDERSTANDING PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS

- During the Middle Ages, people considered "mad" were sometimes caged or given "therapies" such as genital mutilation, beatings, removal of teeth or lengths of intestines, or transfusions of animal blood - Reformers such as Philippe Pinelin opposed brutal treatments. He insisted madness is a sickness of the mind caused by severe stress and inhumane conditions rather than possession. Curing the illness, he said, requires moral treatment, including boosting patients' spirits by unchaining them and talking with them

Insomnia

- Feeling unsatisfied with amount or quality of sleep (trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, or returning to sleep) - Sleep disruption causes distress or diminished everyday functioning - Happens three or more nights each week - Occurs during at least three consecutive months - Independent from other mental disorders or medical condition

Genes and Anxiety Disorders

- Genetic similarities: If one identical twin has an anxiety disorder, the other is also at risk. Even when raised separately, identical twins may develop similar phobias - Some genes influence disorders by regulating brain levels of neurotransmitters. These include serotonin, which influences sleep, mood, and attending to threats, and glutamate, which heightens activity in the brain's alarm centers - Experience affects gene expression. Among those with PTSD, a history of child abuse leaves long-term epigenetic marks, which are often organic molecules. - These molecular tags attach to our chromosomes and turn certain genes on or off. Thus, experiences such as abuse can increase the likelihood that a genetic vulnerability to a disorder will be expressed

Culture and the Biopsychosocial Approach

- In the study of disorders, as in so many other areas, biological, psychological, and sociocultural influences together weave the fabric of our behaviors, our thoughts, and our feelings - As individuals, we differ in the amount of stress we experience and in the ways we cope with stressors. Cultures differ in their sources of stress and in their traditional ways of coping - Major depressive disorder and schizophrenia occur worldwide. - Other disorders tend to be associated with specific cultures. Ex. Latin America lays claim to susto, a condition marked by severe anxiety, restlessness, and a fear of black magic - In Japanese culture, people may experience taijin kyofusho—social anxiety about their appearance - The eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa occur mostly in food-abundant Western cultures - In Malaysia, amok describes a sudden outburst of violent behavior

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

- Schizophrenia comes in varied forms. People with schizophrenia display symptoms that are positive (inappropriate behaviors are present) or negative (appropriate behaviors are absent). - Those with positive symptoms may experience hallucinations, talk in disorganized and deluded ways, and exhibit inappropriate laughter, tears, or rage. - Those with negative symptoms may exhibit an absence of emotion in their voices, expressionless faces, or unmoving—mute and rigid—bodies. - People with schizophrenia sometimes have hallucinations: false sensory experiences, such as seeing something in the absence of an external visual stimulus - Most often, the hallucinations are voices, which sometimes make insulting remarks or give orders Hallucinations are false perceptions. People with schizophrenia also have disorganized, fragmented thinking, often distorted by false beliefs called delusions - If they have paranoid tendencies, they may believe they are being threatened or pursued - One cause of disorganized thinking may be a breakdown in selective attention. - We normally have a remarkable capacity to give our undivided attention to one set of sensory stimuli while filtering out others. - Conversely, people with schizophrenia are easily distracted by tiny unrelated stimuli, such as the grooves on a brick or tones in a voice. 2. Disorganized speech 3. Diminished and inappropriate emotions - The expressed emotions of schizophrenia are often utterly inappropriate, split off from reality - Others with schizophrenia lapse into an emotionless flat affect state of no apparent feeling. - Most also have an impaired theory of mind—they have difficulty perceiving facial expressions and reading others' states of mind. Thus, they struggle to feel sympathy and compassion - These traits have a genetic basis! - Motor behavior may also be inappropriate and disruptive. Those with schizophrenia may experience catatonia, characterized by motor behaviors ranging from a physical stupor—remaining motionless for hours—to senseless, compulsive actions, such as continually rocking or rubbing an arm - Schizophrenia is usually treated, not cured

Research Domain Criteria Project

- Seeking a new but complementary approach to classification, the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has established the Research Domain Criteria project - Its framework helps organize disorders according to behaviors and brain activity related to negative or positive emotions, cognition, social relationships, and arousal and sleep.

Genetic Factors of Schizophrenia

- The 1-in-100 odds of any person being diagnosed with schizophrenia become about 1 in 10 among those who have a sibling or parent with the disorder. If the affected sibling is an identical twin, the odds increase to nearly 1 in 2 - If the co-twin of an identical twin with schizophrenia shared the placenta, the chances of developing the disorder are higher because shared germs produce identical twin similarities - Some genes associated with schizophrenia affect the production of myelin, a fatty substance that coats the axons of nerve cells and lets impulses travel at high speed through neural networks. - Schizophrenia is a group of disorders influenced by many genes, each with very small effects

Classifying Psychological Disorders

- To classify a person's disorder as "schizophrenia" suggests that the person talks incoherently, has bizarre beliefs, shows either little emotion or inappropriate emotion, or is socially withdrawn. - Classification aims not only to identify a person's disorder but also to predict a disorder's future course, suggest appropriate treatment, and prompt research into its causes.

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. - Many people will display survivor resiliency—by recovering after severe stress - Some will even experience posttraumatic growth - One factor for developing PTSD seems to be the amount of trauma-related emotional distress: The higher the distress, such as the level of physical torture suffered by prisoners of war, the greater the risk for posttraumatic symptoms - Some people may have a more sensitive emotion-processing limbic system that floods their bodies with stress hormones, which explains why PTSD may coexist with another disorder - Genes and gender also matter. Twins, compared with non twin siblings, more commonly share PTSD cognitive risk factor - Odds 2x higher for women

OCD

- a disorder characterized by unwanted repetitive thoughts (obsessions), actions (compulsions), or both. - Obsessive thoughts are unwanted and so repetitive it may seem they will never go away. Compulsive behaviors are often responses to those thoughts. - OCD is more common among teens and young adults than among older people - Some people experience other OCD-related disorders, such as hoarding disorder, body dysmorphic disorder or trichotillomania or excoriation disorder

Major Depressive Disorder

- a 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. - Depressed mood most of the time - Dramatically reduced interest or enjoyment in most activities most of the time Significant challenges regulating sleep, appetite and weight - Physical agitation or lethargy - Feeling listless or with much less energy - Feeling worthless, or feeling unwarranted guilt - Problems in thinking, concentrating, or making decisions - Thinking repetitively of death and suicide Depression is the number-one reason people seek mental health services

Conversion Disorder

- a disorder related to somatic symptom disorder in which a person experiences very specific, physical symptoms that are not compatible with recognized medical or neurological conditions - anxiety presumably is converted into a physical symptom

Chronic 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. - Social withdrawal, a negative symptom, is often found among those with chronic schizophrenia - Men's schizophrenia develops an average of 4 years earlier, accompanied with more negative symptoms and is more often chronic

DID

- a rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. - Typically, the original personality denies any awareness of the other(s).

Dissociative

- controversial, rare disorders in which conscious awareness becomes separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings. - The result may be a fugue state, a sudden loss of memory or change in identity, often in response to an overwhelmingly stressful situation

Personality Disorders

- inflexible and enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning. The ten disorders in DSM-5 tend to form three clusters, characterized by: 1. anxiety, such as a fearful sensitivity to rejection that predisposes the withdrawn avoidant personality disorder. 2. eccentric or odd behaviors, such as the emotionless disengagement of schizotypal personality disorder. 3. dramatic or impulsive behaviors, such as the attention-getting borderline personality disorder, the self-focused and self-inflating narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

Non Suicidal Self-Injury

- more common in adolescence and among females - Those who engage in NSSI may cut or burn their skin, hit themselves, insert objects under their nails or skin, or self-administer tattoos. - People who engage in NSSI tend to experience bullying, harassment, and other life stress - They are generally less able to tolerate and regulate emotional distress - They are often extremely self-critical and struggle to communicate, solve problems, and perform academically Through NSSI one may: - find relief from intense negative thoughts through the distraction of pain. - attract attention and possibly get help. - relieve guilt by punishing themselves. - get others to change their negative behavior (bullying, criticism). - fit in with a peer group.

Depressions Vicious Cycle

Being withdrawn, self-focused, and complaining can in turn elicit rejection - Weary of the person's fatigue, hopeless attitude, and negativity, a spouse may threaten to leave or a boss may begin to question the person's competence. (1) Stressful experiences interpreted through (2) a ruminating, pessimistic explanatory style create (3) a hopeless, depressed state that (4) hampers the way the person thinks and acts. This, in turn, fuels (1) further stressful experiences such as rejection. - Bad moods feed on themselves: When we feel down, we think negatively and remember bad experiences.

Rumination and Self-Deprecating

Rumination: compulsive fretting; overthinking our problems and their causes - Staying focused on a problem (thanks to the continuous firing of a frontal lobe area that sustains attention)—can be adaptive - But relentless, self-focused rumination can distract us, increase negative emotion, and disrupt daily activities - Comparisons can also feed misery. - The reason why life's hardships cause only some to develop depression lies partly in their explanatory style—who or what they blame for their failures - So it is with depressed people, who often explain bad events in terms that are stable ("It's going to last forever"), global ("It's going to affect everything I do"), and internal ("It's all my fault") - Depression-prone people respond to bad events in an especially self focused, self-blaming way - When they describe themselves, their brains show extra activity in a region that processes self-relevant information - Their self esteem is easily influenced

Understanding Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain manifested in symptoms of the mind.

Agoraphobia

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

Bulimia Nervosa

is marked by weight fluctuations within or above normal ranges, making the condition easier to hide. Bulimia may also be triggered by a weight-loss diet, broken by gorging on forbidden foods. People with this disorder—mostly women in their late teens or early twenties)—eat in spurts, sometimes influenced by negative emotion or by friends who are binging. In a cycle of repeating episodes, overeating is followed by compensatory vomiting, laxative use, fasting, or excessive exercise. Preoccupied with food and fearful of becoming overweight, binge-purge eaters experience bouts of depression, guilt, and anxiety during and following binges

Epigenetics

Epigenetics: the study of environmental influences on gene expression that occur without a DNA change. In one environment, a gene will be expressed, but in another, it may lie dormant. For some, that will be the difference between developing a disorder or not developing it.

Understanding Antisocial Personality Disorder

- Antisocial personality disorder is woven of both biological and psychological strands. - People with antisocial personalities sometimes spread their genes to future generations by marrying others who have antisocial personalities - No single gene codes for a complex behavior such as crime. Molecular geneticists have, however, identified some specific genes that are more common in those with antisocial personality disorder - The genetic vulnerability of people with antisocial and unemotional tendencies appears as low arousal in response to threats. Ex. Awaiting aversive events, such as electric shocks or loud noises, they show little autonomic nervous system arousal - Long Term studies show that their stress hormone levels were lower than average as teenagers, before committing any crime - Studies have found that preschool boys who later became aggressive or antisocial adolescents tended to be impulsive, uninhibited, unconcerned with social rewards, and low in anxiety - Traits such as fearlessness and dominance can be adaptive. If channeled in more productive directions, fearlessness may lead to athletic stardom, adventurism, or courageous heroism - Genetic influences, often in combination with negative environmental factors such as childhood abuse, family instability, or poverty, help wire the brain - In people with antisocial criminal tendencies, the emotion-controlling amygdala is smaller - The frontal lobes are also less active. The frontal lobes help control impulses. - The genes that put people at risk for antisocial behavior also put people at risk for substance use disorders, which may help explain why these disorders often appear in combination - Genes are not the sole contributor to antisocial behavior, biological risk factors at birth and hardship also play a role - Two combined factors— childhood maltreatment and a gene that altered neurotransmitter balance— predicted antisocial problems - Criminals with antisocial personality disorder display blunted heart rate and perspiration responses, and less activity in brain areas that typically respond to emotional stimuli - They also have a larger and hyper-reactive dopamine reward system, which predisposes their impulsive drive to do something rewarding despite the consequences

Understanding Anxiety Disorders

- Anxiety is both a feeling and a cognition—a doubt-laden appraisal of one's safety or social skill - Conditioning, cognition and biology help interpret anxiety

Understanding Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Disorders

- Behavioral and cognitive changes accompany depression: People trapped in a depressed mood become inactive and feel alone, empty, and without a bright or meaningful future. They become prone to negative thoughts until the depression lifts. - Depression is widespread. - Women's risk of major depressive disorder is nearly double men's. After reaching puberty, girls also become more vulnerable than boys to eating disorders, self-injury, and anxiety. Menopause is also a time of women's increased depression risk. - Women are more vulnerable to disorders involving internalized states such as depression, anxiety, and inhibited sexual desire. Women experience more situations that increase their risk for depression, such as receiving less pay for equal work, juggling multiple roles, and caring for children - Men's disorders tend to be more external—alcohol use disorder, and disorders related to antisocial conduct and lack of impulse control. - Most major depressive episodes self-terminate - Stressful events related to work, marriage, and close relationships often precede depression; depression is often a response to past and current stress. - Experiencing childhood abuse doubles a person's risk of adult depression Compared to generations past, depression strikes earlier and affects more people, with the highest rates among young adults in developed countries. The increase may reflect a cultural difference of today's young adults' greater willingness to disclose depression.

Cognition and Anxiety Disorders

- Conditioning influences our feelings of anxiety, but so does cognition— our thoughts, memories, interpretations, and expectations. - By observing others, we can learn to fear what they fear. Nearly all monkeys raised in the wild fear snakes, yet lab-raised monkeys do not - People with anxiety disorders tend to be hypervigilant. - They attend more to threatening stimuli. They more often interpret unclear stimuli as threatening

David Rosenhan

- David Rosenhan and seven others went to hospital admissions offices, complaining of "hearing voices" saying empty, hollow, and thud. Apart from this complaint and giving false names and occupations, they answered questions truthfully. All eight healthy people were misdiagnosed with disorders. LABELS FOSTER BIAS - In another study, people watched recorded interviews. If told the interviewees were job applicants, the viewers perceived them as normal, but if they were told otherwise they would view them differently

what brain structures show abnormal activity in major depressive disorder pts?

- In people with bipolar disorder, studies discovered a decrease in myelinated axons and enlarged fluid-filled ventricles - Depression can cause the brain's reward centers to become less active - During positive emotions, the left frontal lobe and an adjacent reward center become more active

DSM-5

- In the United States, the most common tool for describing disorders and estimating how often they occur is the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, now (DSM-5). - Physicians and mental health workers use the detailed "diagnostic criteria and codes" in the DSM-5 to guide medical diagnoses and treatment - The DSM-5's diagnostic criteria and codes closely resemble those in the WHO's International Classification of Diseases, making it easy to track worldwide trends in psychological disorders. - Critics have long faulted the DSM for casting too wide a net and bringing "almost any kind of behavior within the compass of psychiatry"

Sadness vs. Depression

- Joy, contentment, sadness, and despair exist at different points on a continuum, points at which any of us may find ourselves at any given moment. - To feel bad in reaction to profoundly sad events is to be in touch with reality. In such times, sadness is a warning signal that we should stop and take appropriate measures - Biologically speaking, life's purpose is not happiness but survival and reproduction - Depression resembles a sort of psychic hibernation: It slows us down, prompting us, when losing a relationship or blocked from a goal, to conserve energy. When we grind temporarily to a halt and reassess our life, as depressed people do, we can redirect our energy in more promising ways - Even mild sadness helps people process and recall faces more accurately. They also tend to pay more attention to details, think more critically and make better decisions

Does Disorder = Danger?

- Most violent criminals are not mentally ill, and most mentally ill people are not violent - Clinical prediction of violence is unreliable. The few people with disorders who commit violent acts tend to be either those who experience threatening delusions and hallucinated voices that command them to act, who have suffered a financial crisis or lost relationship, or who abuse substances - People with disorders are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence - A legal insanity defense asserts that the defendant cannot be held responsible for a criminal act - "Insanity" is a legal rather than a psychological concept - Mental health practitioners may be asked to interview and assess offenders and provide their expert opinions, or to discuss an existing client, which may be done only with the client's approval

Bipolar Disorders

- Our genes dispose some of us, more than others, to respond emotionally to good and bad events Bipolar Disorder: a disorder in which a person alternates between the hopelessness and lethargy of depression and the overexcited state of mania. People bounce 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. - During the manic phase, people with bipolar disorder typically have little need for sleep. They show fewer sexual inhibitions. Their positive emotions persist abnormally. Their speech is loud, flighty, and hard to interrupt. - In milder forms, mania's energy and flood of ideas can fuel creativity. Clusters of genes associated with high creativity increase the likelihood of having bipolar disorder, and risk factors for developing bipolar disorder predict greater creativity - Those who rely on precision and logic, such as architects, designers, and journalists, suffer bipolar disorder less often than do those who rely on emotional expression and vivid imagery - Affects men + women equally The new DSM-5 classifications have begun to reduce the number of child and adolescent bipolar diagnoses: Some of those who are persistently irritable and who have frequent and recurring behavior outbursts are now instead diagnosed with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder

Suicide and Self-Injury

- People seldom commit suicide while in the depths of depression, when energy and initiative are lacking. The risk increases when they begin to rebound and become capable of following through - Within Europe, people in the most suicide-prone country (Belarus) have been 16 times more likely to kill themselves than those in the least (Georgia) - Within the United States, Whites and Native Americans kill themselves twice as often as Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians - Women are much more likely than men to attempt suicide. But men are two to four times more likely to actually end their lives - In late adulthood, rates increase, with the highest rate among 45- to 64-year-olds and the second-highest among those 85 and older - Suicide rates have been much higher among the rich, the nonreligious, and those single, widowed, or divorced - Witnessing physical pain and trauma can increase the risk of suicide, which may help explain veterans' and physicians' elevated suicide rates - Gay, transgender, and gender nonconforming youth facing an unsupportive environment, including family or peer rejection, are also at increased risk of attempting suicide - Negative emotion tends to go up midweek - Following highly publicized suicides and TV programs featuring suicide, known suicides increase - Guns increase the odds of suicide

Prenatal Environment and Risk of Developing Schizophrenia

- Risk factors include low birth weight, maternal diabetes, older paternal age, and oxygen deprivation during delivery - Viral diseases increase risks of schizophrenia Cold = flu season

The Depressed Brain

- Scanning devices let us eavesdrop on the brain's activity during depressed and manic states. - Many studies have found diminished brain activity during slowed down depressive states, and more activity during periods of mania. - Depression can cause the brain's reward centers to become less active - During positive emotions, the left frontal lobe and an adjacent reward center become more active - Neuroscientists have also discovered altered brain structures in people with bipolar disorder. These studies discovered a decrease in myelinated axons and enlarged fluid-filled ventricles - Norepinephrine, which increases arousal and boosts mood, is scarce during depression and overabundant during mania. Drugs that decrease mania reduce norepinephrine. - Serotonin is also scarce or inactive during depression Significant stress + serotonin-controlling gene = depression Gene-environment interaction - Drugs that relieve depression tend to increase norepinephrine or serotonin supplies by blocking either their reuptake (as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil do with serotonin) or their chemical breakdown. - Repetitive physical exercise, such as jogging, reduces depression in part because it increases serotonin, which affects mood and arousal

Learned Helplessness and State-Dependent Memory

- Self-defeating beliefs may arise from learned helplessness, the hopelessness and passive resignation humans and other animals learn when they experience uncontrollable painful events - Depression runs more rampant in the west because of the rise of individualism and the decline of commitment to religion and family. - Pessimistic, overgeneralized, self-blaming attributions may create a depressing sense of hopelessness - The negative explanations coincide with a depressed mood, and they are indicators of depression - Memory researchers call the tendency to recall experiences that fit our current good or bad mood state-dependent memory

Abnormal Brain Activity and Anatomy: Schizophrenia

- Some people diagnosed with schizophrenia have abnormally low brain activity in the frontal lobes, areas that help us reason, plan, and solve problems - Brain scans also show a noticeable decline in the brain waves that reflect synchronized neural firing in the frontal lobes - When participants heard a voice or saw something, their brain became vigorously active in several core regions. - One was the thalamus, the structure that filters incoming sensory signals and transmits them to the brain's cortex. - Another PET scan study of people with paranoia found increased activity in the amygdala, a fear-processing center - Many studies have also found enlarged, fluid-filled ventricles and a corresponding shrinkage and thinning of cerebral tissue - If one affected identical twin shows brain abnormalities, the odds are at least 1 in 2 that the other twin's brain will have them - The greater the brain shrinkage, the more severe the thought disorder - Smaller-than-normal areas may include the cortex, the hippocampus, and the corpus callosum connecting the brain's two hemispheres - Another is the thalamus, which may explain why people with schizophrenia have difficulty filtering sensory input and focusing attention - Schizophrenia also tends to involve a loss of neural connections across the brain network

Rates of Psychological Disorders

- The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (2015) has estimated that just under 1 in 5 adult Americans currently have or had a "mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder" - According to a WHO study, the lowest rate of reported mental disorders was in Nigeria, the highest rate in the United States. Moreover, immigrants to the United States from Mexico, Africa, and Asia averaged better mental health than their U.S. counterparts with the same ethnic heritage IMMIGRANT PARADOX - The incidence of serious psychological disorders is 2.5 times higher among those below the poverty line. This correlation indicates that mental illness can lead to poverty and that the stresses and demoralization of poverty can also precipitate disorders, especially depression in women and substance abuse in men

The Biopsychosocial Approach

- The biopsychosocial approach emphasizes that mind and body are inseparable; Negative emotions can contribute to physical illness, and physical abnormalities can likewise contribute to negative emotions. - The biopsychosocial approach gave rise to the stress vulnerability model - This model suggests that individual characteristics combine with environmental stressors to increase or decrease the likelihood of developing a psychological disorder

The Medical Model

- 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. - A mental illness needs to be treated based on the diagnosis of its symptoms. It needs to be treated through therapy, which may include time in a psychiatric hospital.

Understanding Eating Disorders

- Those with eating disorders often have low self-evaluations, set perfectionist standards, fret about falling short of expectations, and are intensely concerned with how others perceive them - Heredity also matters - A serotonin deficit increases one's chances of developing an eating disorder - Those most vulnerable to eating disorders are also those (usually women or gay men) who most idealize thinness and have the greatest body dissatisfaction

Conditioning and Anxiety Disorders

- Through classical conditioning, our fear responses can become linked with formerly neutral objects and events. Ex. an infant —"Little Albert"—learned to fear furry objects that researchers paired with loud noises Anxiety or an anxiety-related disorder is more likely to develop when bad events happen unpredictably and uncontrollably - Even a single painful and frightening event may trigger a full-blown phobia, thanks to two conditioning processes: classical conditioning's stimulus generalization and operant conditioning's reinforcement. - Stimulus generalization occurs when a person experiences a fearful event and later develops a fear of similar events - Reinforcement helps maintain learned fears and anxieties. Anything that enables us to avoid or escape a feared situation can reinforce maladaptive behaviors. Example is not leaving the house fearing a panic attack

The Brain and Anxiety Disorders

- Traumatic fear learning experiences can leave tracks in the brain, creating fear circuits within the amygdala. These fear pathways create easy inroads for more fear experiences - Generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, phobias, OCD, and PTSD express themselves biologically as overarousal of brain areas involved in impulse control and habitual behaviors. These disorders reflect a brain danger-detection system gone hyperactive—producing anxiety when no danger exists - Brain scans of people with PTSD show higher-than-normal activity in the amygdala when they view traumatic images - The anterior cingulate cortex, a brain region that monitors our actions and checks for errors, seems especially likely to be hyperactive - Some antidepressant drugs dampen this fear-circuit activity and its associated obsessive-compulsive behavior. - Fears can also be blunted by giving people drugs as they recall and then reconsolidate a traumatic experience

Natural Selection and Anxiety Disorders

- We are biologically prepared to fear threats faced by our ancestors - Those fearless about these occasional threats were less likely to survive and leave descendants. It is easy to condition and hard to extinguish fears of such "evolutionarily relevant" stimuli - A fear of flying may be rooted in our biological predisposition to fear confinement and heights. - Compare our easy-to-learn fears with those we do not easily learn. World War II air raids, for example, produced remarkably few lasting phobias. - Just as our phobias focus on dangers faced by our ancestors, our compulsive acts typically exaggerate behaviors that contributed to our species' survival Ex. Grooming had survival value. Gone wild, it becomes compulsive hair pulling.

Dopamine Overactivity and Schizophrenia

- When researchers examined schizophrenia patients' brains after death, they found an excess number of dopamine receptors, including a sixfold excess for the dopamine receptor D4 - Such a hyper-responsive dopamine system may intensify brain signals in schizophrenia, creating positive symptoms such as hallucinations and paranoia - Drugs that block dopamine receptors often lessen these symptoms.

Gender and Depression

- Women may respond more strongly to stress Relationship stresses also affect teen girls more than boys - This gender stress difference may help explain why, beginning in their early teens, women have been nearly twice as vulnerable to depression. - Women's higher risk of depression is linked to their tendency to ruminate

Antisocial Personality Disorder

- 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. - Symptoms usually appear at age 8 and lack of conscience becomes apparent around 15 - People with antisocial personality disorder may show lower emotional intelligence—the ability to understand, manage, and perceive emotions - Despite their remorseless and sometimes criminal behavior, criminality is not an essential component of antisocial behavior - When the antisocial personality combines a keen intelligence with amorality, the result may be a charming and clever con artist—or a fearless, focused, ruthless soldier, surgeon, or CEO - Antisocial personalities behave impulsively, and then feel and fear little

GAD

- an anxiety disorder in which a person is continually tense, apprehensive, and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal. - The person usually cannot identify, and therefore relieve or avoid, the tension's cause. - it may lead to physical problems, such as high blood pressure

Panic Disorder

- an anxiety disorder marked by unpredictable, minutes-long episodes of intense dread in which a person may experience terror and accompanying chest pain, choking, or other frightening sensations; often followed by worry over a possible next attack. - Smokers have at least a doubled risk of panic disorder and greater symptoms when they do have an attack

Pyschological Disorders

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

Binge Eating Disorder

Those who have it engage in significant bouts of overeating, followed by remorse. But they do not purge, fast, or exercise excessively and thus may be overweight.

Risk for OCD and PTSD

When the brain's danger-detection system becomes hyperactive, we are at greater risk for an anxiety disorder and for two other disorders that involve anxiety: OCD and PTSD

Schizophrenia

a disorder characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and/or diminished, inappropriate emotional expression. It refers not to a multiple personality split but rather to the mind's split from reality

Illness Anxiety Disorder

a disorder related to somatic symptom disorder in which a person interprets normal physical sensations as symptoms of a disease.

Accute Schizophrenia

a form of schizophrenia that can begin at any age; frequently occurs in response to a traumatic event

Psychotic Disorders

a group of disorders marked by irrational ideas, distorted perceptions, and a loss of contact with reality.

Somatic Symptom Disorder

a psychological disorder in which the symptoms take a somatic (bodily) form without apparent physical cause

ADHD

a psychological disorder marked by extreme inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity

Phobia

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

Anorexia Nervosa

typically begins as a weight-loss diet. People with anorexia—usually female adolescents,—drop significantly below normal weight. Yet they feel fat, fear being fat, diet obsessively, and sometimes exercise excessively. About half of those with anorexia display a binge-purge-depression cycle.