Chapter 2 - The History of Abnormal Psychology

Correlational study (2 of 3, methods of investigation)

Correlation is the degree to which events or characteristics relate to each other. Correlation is NOT causation; it only explains the degree to which a change in one variable is associated with a change in the other. Benefits: Can collect much information from many subjects, Can study a wide range of variables and their inter-relations, Study variables that are not easily produced in the lab, Often used for ethical reasons Limitations: Already mentioned, but worth mentioning twice - correlation does not indicate causation, When people answer questions (i.e., take a survey), are they always honest in their responses?

Lobotomy

Lobotomy, a neurosurgical operation that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal lobe, was first used to treat mental illness in 1935. This procedure was used for a wide variety of reasons ranging from depression to schizophrenia, but came with severe side effects including increased temperature, vomiting, bladder and bowel incontinence and eye problems, as well apathy, lethargy, and abnormal sensations of hunger, among others. About 40,000 and 50,000 lobotomies were performed, the majority taking place between the late 1940s and early 1950s.

melancholia

Marked by anxiety, fear, and seclusiveness resulting from excessive black bile. Includes hallucinations.

Case study (1 of 3, methods of investigation)

A comprehensive description of an individual or group of individuals that focuses on assessment or description of abnormal behavior or its treatment Benefits: Can focus on the assessment and description of abnormal behavior or its treatment, Opportunity to study unusual problems, Generate hypothesis for group studies Allow practitioners to be involved in research, Illustrates important clinical issues Limitations: Impossible to replicate, Limited in ability to understand abnormal behavior, Inability to make any firm conclusions, Do not include control groups Phineas Gage, the individual discussed in the brain video, would make an excellent case study.

Cognitive Psychology

A perspective that emerged mid-1950's from an analogy that compared the mental processes to the information processing model of a computer. This perspective contributed to the understanding of psychological disorders by focusing on specific changes in mental processes. According to cognitive psychologists people's irrational and inaccurate thoughts can contribute to psychological disorders.

Mid-16th Century

Bedlam hospital in England - beautiful on the outside, horror on the inside. The precursor to the modern asylum. "madhouses" - usually permanently chained to a wall living out the rest of their lives amid conditions of incredible filth and cruelty. Initially a refuge, quickly overcrowded by those society deemed abnormal or violent.

Behaviorism

Behavioral theories explain abnormal behavior via the laws of learning. This perspective focuses on understanding directly observable behavior in order to understand mental illness & other psychological phenomena. Behaviorists' proposed scientifically testable mechanisms to explain how maladaptive behavior arises and believed that it can result from learning. Famous behaviorists include Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, Edward Thorndike, and B.F. Skinner.

Abnormal Psychology Today

Biopsychosocial approach - Biological (physical health) - Psychological (self-esteem, coping skills) - Social (peers, family) Biological / Psychological = temperament, IQ Biological / Social = drug effects Social Psychological = family relationships, trauma

Middle Ages

Catholic Church took dominance in Europe resulting in a rise in supernatural; Superstition, astrology, and alchemy took over. Common treatments: prayer rites, exorcism, ice bathing, torture, starvation, relic touching, confessions, and atonement.

Prehistoric

Causes by supernatural evil spirits. Treated with Trephination. Additional treatments included beatings, ice-cold baths, castration, burnings, mutilation, and transfusion with animal's blood.

Bloodletting

Common historical treatment that was used widely to cure many ailments. This is still used today: "cupping". Leach therapy is also making a comeback.

Freud suggested that the mind is organized to function across three levels of consciousness:

Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious

Social Causation or Social Drift (Sociocultural Psychology)

Social causation theory suggests that stress, poverty, racism, inferior education, unemployment, and social changes are risk factors for abnormal behavior. The social drift hypothesis explains higher rates of some disorders among lower socioeconomic groups as the consequence of people falling into lower socioeconomic levels as a result of their disorders.

Stimulus control therapy

Stimulus control occurs when a person behaves in one way in the presence of a given stimulus and another way in its absence. The therapy attempts to change someone's associations with that specific stimulus so that it no longer guides their behavior. For instance, with insomnia, this principle is used to break negative associations of the bed as a place of frustration.

serotonin

affects sleep and wakefulness, esp. falling asleep. Affects mood and thought process. Probably plays a role in thought disorders of schizophrenia, decrease in depression, possible decrease in anxiety and OCD.

Heritability

an estimate of how much of the variation in a characteristic within a population (in a specific environment) can be attributed to genetics. Many variables can affect the estimate of the heritability of a given psychological disorder. Environmental effects of heritability are difficult to assess. One particular difficulty is the wide variance in how situations and events are perceived and understood, such as how children of different ages perceive divorce.

Independent variables

are the variables that a researcher manipulates or changes.

Identical twins (or monozygotic twins)

basically the same genetic makeup because they begin life as a single fertilized egg (or zygote) that then divides to become two embryos.

Fraternal twins (or dizygotic twins)

begin life as different fertilized They have about 50% overlap in the genes that vary among humans, the same as any other siblings.

Hippocrates identified four essential bodily fluids, "humors," influenced physical and mental health, and that the combination of these fluids will help determine the person's temperament. What are the four humors?

black bile, blood, yellow bile, phlegm - an imbalance was the cause of mental illness

etiology

cause (of a psychological disease)

population

complete set of possible participants

Preconscious

consists of thoughts and feelings that a person does not perceive, but that can be brought voluntarily into conscious awareness in the future.

dopamine

controls complex movements, cognition, motivation, and pleasure. regulates emotional responses. increase in schizophrenia and mania, decrease in depression and parkinson's

hydrotherapy

early 1900s, immersion in a tub of water, was used to make a patient relax when agitated or relieve some ailment. The treatment typically lasted anywhere between a few hours to the span of an entire night.

Hippocrates classified mental illness into one of four categories, what are the four categories?

epilepsy, mania, melancholia, phrenitis

Thorazine

first psychotropic medication - 1955, revolutionized the field of abnormal psychology, by replacing popular treatment options such as restraints, electro-convulsive shock therapy, and lobotomies.

Biological (Biopsychosocial approach)

genetics, structure and function of the brain, function of other bodily systems

Internal validity

high if it controls for confounding variables, thus increasing the likelihood that the independent variable is responsible for variations in the dependent variable.

External validity

high when the results generalize from the sample (the particular participants) to the general If a study does not have internal validity, it cannot have external validity; however, internal validity does not guarantee external validity.

Unconscious

includes thoughts and feelings that cannot be perceived or called into awareness on command, but which have power to influence a person.

the tranquilizing chair

invented by American Physician Benjamin Rush, used to used to limit motion and reduce sensory stimulation by covering the head and blocking vision. This device was thought to calm people with mania.

Control groups and conditions

limit the effect of confounds in an experiment. The experimental group (or groups) and the control group are treated identically throughout the experiment, but the control group does not receive the manipulation. Control groups should have similar characteristics as the experimental group and each group should be treated similarly.

Renaissance

mental illness continued to be viewed as resulting from demonic possession. Witch craft was blamed. 100,000+ women burned - accused of being witches

cages

mentally ill patients kept in cages, vertical bed cages used for ultra violent patients.

Childhood trauma + genetic predisposition = vulnerability to mental disorder

minimal stress = low chance to become mental illness inability to cope with excessive stress = high probability of mental illness

Conscious

normal awareness, consists of thoughts and feelings that we can easily think about.

supernatural (causes of psychological disorders)

a theory that explains abnormality in terms of demonic or spirit possessions and/or causes beyond the observable universe..

psychogenic (causes of psychological disorders)

a theory that explains abnormality in terms of psychological causes

mania

a yellow bile and blood disease marked by excessive uncontrollability.

Brain and Biology, often referred to as the medical model of abnormal behavior

3lbs., Your brain is composed of approximately 86-100 billion neurons

norepinephrine

Affects attention, learning, memory, and regulation of mood, sleep, and wakefulness. decrease in depression, increased in schizophrenia, mania, and anxiety

Dorothea Dix (1802-1887)

American activist and school teacher, Lobbied for better treatment for the mentally ill in asylums. This resulted in the growth of the mental hygiene movement. She helped raise millions of dollars to build new, more suitable hospitals for the mentally ill. By 1880, she was successful in establishing over 30 mental institutions in United States and Canada.

Benjamin Rush (1745-1813)

American physician, Rush is the founder of American psychiatry & one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He helped propel the moral treatment movement in the United States. He also was the first person to organize a course in psychiatry in America.

GABA

Amino acid that modulates other neurotransmitters in the brain, decrease in anxiety and schizophrenia.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Austrian neurologist and the father of psychoanalysis, Freud concluded that many forms of abnormal behavior were caused by unconscious struggles between instinctual desires and social prohibitions against fulfilling those desires. He is credited with developing the first purely psychological model of abnormal behavior.

Response cost

Decreases an unwanted behavior by removing a reward or privilege following the behavior; fines are an example. This is often employed within token economy programs, which are common is psychiatric hospitals.

Aversive therapy

Discourages unwanted behavior by pairing the behavior or cues that lead to the behavior with noxious stimuli such as electric shock, nausea, or imaginary aversive events. Antabuse (disulfiram), a medication that causes people to feel sick after consuming alcohol, is an example of this treatment principle.

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

ECT is a procedure, done under general anesthesia, in which small electric currents are passed through the brain, intentionally triggering a brief seizure. ECT seems to cause changes in brain chemistry that can quickly reverse symptoms of certain mental illnesses. It often works when other treatments are unsuccessful.

William Tuke (1732-1822)

English Quaker, Established the first humane institution, the York Retreat in 1796, in the British Isles. This country house retreat provided a humane center for mental patients to live, work, and rest in a kind and accepting environment for over 200 years.

Experimental study (3 of 3, methods of investigation)

Experiments are research studies in which investigators intentionally manipulate one variable at a time and measure the consequences of such manipulation on one or more other variables; they are the ideal method for conducting research. This is the only method that will provide a cause-and-effect-relationship.

Time out

Extinguishes unwanted behavior by temporarily removing the person, usually a child, from setting where reinforces (rewards) exist. this is a key component of most parenting training programs.

Philippe Pinel (1745-1826)

French physician, In 1793 instituted reforms in LaBicêtre, a hospital in Paris. He removed the chains from patients and stopped treatments that involved bleeding, starvation, and physical punishment. He believed madness was a disease that had many different forms. He recommended that individuals be treated through psychological means such as reasoning. Under these reforms many patients who had been incarcerated for years were restored to health and eventually discharged from the hospital.

Psychoanalysis

Freud developed the Psychoanalytic theory which posits that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are a result of conscious and unconscious forces continually interacting in the mind. Psychoanalysis was the dominant psychogenic treatment for mental illness during the first half of the 20th century, providing the launching pad for more than 400 different schools of psychotherapy found today.

Hippocrates

Greek physician (460-377 B.C.), often considered the father of modern medicine, saw abnormal behavior as a disease arising from internal physical problems. He believed that the brain was responsible for mental activity and mental illness arouse from brain pathology. (Golden Age of Greece)

Humanism

Humanistic psychology emerged in the 1960's as a reaction against psychoanalysis and behaviorism.These theories believe that human behavior is determined by each person's unique perception of the world, which can allow a person to flourish or to falter. Humanists focus on free will, innate goodness, creativity, and the self. Famous humanists include Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), left, and Carl Rogers (1902 -1987).

Freud believed that there are three psychological structures of the mind that influence one's personality:

Id, Ego, Superego. Freud believed that conflicts among the id, ego, and superego can cause symptoms of mental disorders.

Vincenzo Chiarugi (1759-1820)

Italian physician, Unchained patients at his St. Boniface hospital in Florence, Italy (1785) and encouraged good hygiene and recreational and occupational training.

Exposure

Reduces anxiety by having clients maintain real or imagined contract with anxiety-provoking stimuli until the fear dissipates. This is the most important principle to address in the treatment of phobias and other anxiety disorders.

systematic desensitization

Reduces anxiety by having clients visualize a graded series of anxiety-provoking stimuli (e.g. climbing higher and higher on a ledge from someone who is afraid of heights while maintaining a relaxed state.

Experimental Study limitations

Researchers cannot cause certain variables (such as creating a loss in a person's life or causing depression in clients); thus, researchers are limited in what they can study. All research is vulnerable to confounding variables (or confounds), factors that might inadvertently affect the variables of interest in the experiment. To minimize the possibility of confounds, the researcher should try to examine every reasonable hypothesis that might explain the effect.

Twin and Adoption Studies

Researchers take twins who were separated at birth and raised in different homes, and then compare them to twins who were raised in the same home. Researchers also study unrelated children who were adopted and raised together, then compare them to unrelated children who were reared in different homes. In both cases, it is not easy to disentangle the effects of genes and the environment.

18th and 19th Century

Rise of ethical treatments. During this time, reformers called for removal of permanent restraints and requested that patients be treated with kindness & respect, be provided with adequate facilities which would serve as a community instead of a jail, and receive more appropriate and humane treatment.

Superego

Seat of a person's conscience and works to impose morality.

Id

Seat of sexual and aggressive drives, as well as of the desire for immediate gratification of physical and psychological needs. The pleasure principle.

hypothalamus

a region of the forebrain below the thalamus which coordinates both the autonomic nervous system and the activity of the pituitary, controlling body temperature, thirst, hunger, and other homeostatic systems, and involved in sleep and emotional activity.

neurotransmitters

The chemicals that neurons rely on to communicate

forebrain

The forebrain controls body temperature, reproductive functions, eating, sleeping, and the display of emotions.

midbrain

The midbrain or mesencephalon is the forward-most portion of the brainstem and is associated with vision, hearing, motor control, sleep and wakefulness

thalamus

The thalamus is a small structure within the brain located just above the brain stem between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain and has extensive nerve connections to both. The primary function of the thalamus is to relay motor and sensory signals to the cerebral cortex.

Sociocultural Psychology

These models explain abnormality in terms of external factors, such as harmful environments, adverse social policies, powerlessness, and cultural traditions. The various versions of this model suggest that maladaptive behavior develops when people's needs and abilities are not well suited to their environment. By implication, treatment involves changing the broader social, environmental, and cultural climate to promote health.

Social Labeling (Sociocultural Psychology)

This extreme version of cultural relativism suggests that mental disorders are merely labels applied to behavior that is unpopular or troubling. This position is associated with 20th century American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz.

Social Relativism (Sociocultural Psychology)

This perspective holds that the same standards and definitions of abnormal behavior do not apply in all cultures.

the circulating swing

This was used to spin depressed patients at high speeds. Spinning the patient until loss of consciousness occurred was thought to be helpful in rearranging the contents of the brain.

random assignment

To control against bias, ach participant has the same chance of being assigned to the control or experimental group.

Ego

Tries to mediate the id's demands for immediate gratification and the superego's high standards of morality, as well as the constraints of external reality. The reality principle.

epilepsy

Unlikely to develop after the age of 12, a surplus of phlegm causes the brain to be too humid, sweaty, smelly

scientific method

Valid conclusions about the origins and treatment of abnormal behavior are gained through the collection of empirical data and the process of hypothesis testing.

phrenitis

a mental confusion, or a mental delirium with fever. Sometimes referred to as "brain fever."

The deinstitutionalization movement

a policy of moving people with a mental illness out of large institutions, effectively changed how individuals diagnosed with psychological disorders were viewed and treated. Around this time, many realized that providing humane care for the mentally ill is a necessity. Patients gained rights of their own. Extensive efforts were made to shut down mental hospitals and integrate patients back into communities where they would have access to community-based treatment. Decline in US hospital population - 500k+ in 1950 to 100k in 1990s

somatogenic (causes of psychological disorders)

a theory that explains abnormal behaviors in terms of biological, physical, and/or chemical causes

Sampling bias

occurs when the participants are not drawn randomly from the relevant population, which prevents the research from being generalized or applied to the wider population.

Bias

occurs when the researcher consciously or inadvertently treats the experimental and control groups differently

acetylcholine

sleep / wake cycles, signals muscles to become active, decreased in alzheimer's and parkinson's

Social (Biopsychosocial approach)

social interactions and the environment in which they occur

Historical causes sorted into three categories, what are they?

supernatural, somatogenic, psychogenic

Social skills traning

teaches anxious or socially ineffective clients how to interact more confidentially and competently with others. This is widely used with people who have social anxiety disorder or autism spectrum disorder.

Trephination

technique that cuts a circular opening into the skull to reveal brain tissue. Was used in prehistoric times to release evil spirits which cause psychological problems.

Behavioral genetics

the field that investigates the degree to which variability of characteristics in a population arise from genetic versus environmental factors. Genes and environment interact through feedback loops; thus the phenotype is described as the product of genes in a specific environment—the same genes can have different effects in different environments.

hindbrain

the lower part of the brainstem, comprising the cerebellum, pons, and medulla oblongata.

cerebrum

the principal and most anterior part of the brain in vertebrates, located in the front area of the skull and consisting of two hemispheres, left and right, separated by a fissure. It is responsible for the integration of complex sensory and neural functions and the initiation and coordination of voluntary activity in the body.

sample

the small portion of the population examined in the study

Psychological (Biopsychosocial approach)

thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

chastity devices

used in mental institutions to prevent patients from pleasuring themselves as that was believed to be a cause of insanity

Dependent variables

variables that are measured in terms of the changes that occur as a result of manipulation of the independent variable.