Psych Unit 5
Clinical Psychology
Focused mainly on people with disorders (mental illness) Typically work in hospitals, clinics, or private practice Usually requires doctoral degree (Ph.D. or Psy.D.) Harder to get into clinical psychology Ph.D. program than to get into medical school!
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
Adds mindfulness meditation to other cognitive therapies
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
As the name implies, Generalized Anxiety Disorder a general anxiety that applies to most aspects of the person's life. It involves constant worrying about even mundane things, and it can be very debilitating.
Cognitive Restructuring:
Attempts to change how the client perceives and interprets events to avoid negative bias
Cognitive restructuring
Attempts to change how the client perceives and interprets events to avoid negative bias
What are the two main mechanisms by which neurotransmitters are cleared out of the synaptic cleft? [Select the two correct answers.]
Breakdown (the transmitters are broken down into smaller molecules by means of enzymes), Reuptake (the transmitters are taken back up into the axon terminals for re-use)
Cognitive behavior therapy
Combines cognitive and behavioral therapies
The Diathesis-Stress Model
Diathesis refers to the factors that put someone at risk for a disorder (e.g., genes). However, these factors alone don't produce the disorder. There needs to be some kind of environmental factor (stress) that causes the predisposition to become manifested as a mental illness.
For the treatment of psychological disorders, which of the following are major disadvantages of drug therapies relative to psychological therapies? [Select all that are correct.]
Drug therapies may impact the body and not just the brain, Drug therapies are typically effective only while the patient is taking the medication, drug therapies often have significant side effects
Which of the following have been shown to be effective treatments for depression?
Electroconvulsive shock therapy (ECT), Psychological therapies such as cognitive behavior therapy , Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) , Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
When possible, studies of psychological therapies use active control conditions rather than no-treatment control conditions. This is because active control conditions are designed to:
Equate the expectations of the participants in the treatment group and the control group
Allostasis reflects the body's ability to:
Flexibly adapt to changing environmental demands
Counseling Psychology
Focused mainly on helping people who are struggling but do not have a disorder or mental illness • Marriage counseling, family counseling, vocational counseling, educational counseling Often requires a master's degree rather than a doctoral degree Easier to get into counseling programs than clinical programs
antagonist
Has the same effect as decreasing neurotransmitter release
Agonist:
Has the same effect as increasing neurotransmitter release
Interpersonal Therapy
Helps the person understand their relationships and teaches interpersonal skills
interpersonal therapy
Helps the person understand their relationships and teaches interpersonal skills
The field of health psychology focuses on:
How attitudes, behaviors, and social factors affect health
Rational-Emotive Therapy
Identify and change irrational and maladaptive patterns of thought
Why do randomized controlled trials randomly assign patients to the different interventions rather than letting the patients choose which intervention they prefer?
If the patients chose the intervention, there might be preexisting differences between the groups, making it impossible to know if the interventions caused any observed differences in outcome
Materialism
If you see a dog, which leads to the binding of transmitters to receptors on a variety of neurons so that you have the conscious perception of the dog, we need a way of clearing out those neurotransmitters so that you don't keep seeing the dog when you look away
bipolar 2
In bipolar II, the manic episodes are less extreme and may actually be viewed as highly positive. However, people with bipolar II also suffer from periods of deep depression that can be highly debilitating.
Thought Disorders
In dissociative amnesia, someone will lose their memory for a specific event or period of time. In extreme cases, the person might forget who they are, what their name is, where they live, etc. This is called dissociative fugue.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy
Involves focusing your attention on a single thought or experience for an extended period of time
Applied Psychology
M.A. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology • Examines behavior and productivity in the workplace. • Implement programs to recruit and motivate workers, increase job satisfaction, retention, and efficiency and avoid accidents
The case of "Joey" is fairly typical of the development of schizophrenia. People who later develop schizophrenia often exhibit ______________ and Impaired social engagement in early childhood, and they often exhibit Psychosis prior to meeting the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia. The most common age of schizophrenia onset is _____________
Neuromotor abnormalities ; in early adulthood
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
OCD is related to anxiety because someone will become overly anxious about something like terrorism or germs, and the compulsive behavior is an attempt to reduce the anxiety. Obsessions are recurring, intrusive thoughts; compulsions are repetitive anxietyrelated actions.
Which of the following statements are true of biological explanations for the etiology and symptoms of psychological disorders?
One's total set of genes strongly predicts whether one will experience a given psychological disorder, In many cases, there are large differences in brain structure and function between people with a given disorder and healthy control participants
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
PTSD is typically a long-term consequence of a major traumatic event. PTSD tends to involve an inability to suppress memories related to the trauma and an overgeneralization of the trauma to new events that are not traumatic.
The most significant problem with current medication-based treatments for schizophrenia is:
Patients often stop taking the medications and then have a relapse
COMORBIDITY
People who have a diagnosis of one disorder are much more likely to also be diagnosed with another disorder.
According to the study discussed in lecture, poverty during childhood may lead to:
Poor health outcomes during adulthood by increasing allostatic load
Benzodiazepines
Potentiates the activity of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA
Lifetime Prevalence
Proportion of people in a population who have the condition of interest at any point in their life so far.
Period Prevalence
Proportion of people in a population who have the condition of interest within a particular time period (e.g., 12 months).
Tricyclic antidepressant
Reduces reuptake of both serotonin and norepinephrine
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)
Reduces reuptake of serotonin but not other transmitters
Monoamine oxidase inhibitor
Reduces the breakdown of transmitter molecules
Social Anxiety Disorder
Social anxiety goes beyond simple shyness. It involves very significant distress and frequent avoidance of social situations. About 7% of adults meet the diagnostic criteria social anxiety at a given time, and the lifetime prevalence is ~12%.
Persistent Depressive Disorder (Dysthymia
Some people experience a less intense kind of depression that lasts for several years. This is called persistent depressive disorder or dysthymia.
Why is it important to rigorously test the effectiveness of psychological therapies?
Some psychological therapies can actually make people worse, If a therapy is ineffective, people who use it may lose the opportunity to try an effective therapy (an opportunity cost)
Which of the following best predicts long-term outcome (e.g., employment) in people with schizophrenia?
The degree to which basic cognitive processes are impaired
Etiology
The etiology of a disorder is the set of factors that was originally responsible for the disorder. This can be distinguished from the factors that explain the current set of symptoms.
If the Rosenhan (1973) study were repeated today, it is unlikely that the pseudopatients would be diagnosed with schizophrenia or hospitalized for a long period. What are three major factors that are responsible for this change?
The system is now designed to minimize long-term hospitalization, Antipsychotic medications are now available that are effective in at least 70% of patient, The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia have changed dramatically since 1973
applied behavior analysis
The therapist will usually start with simple behaviors, like making eye contact or listening to words and pointing at the corresponding pictures. Once these simple behaviors have been trained, more complex behaviors are taught. ABA can be a very slow process that requires lots and lots of repetition. Often, it takes 20-40 hours per week of this kind of therapy over a period of several years. However, when you have a child with a severe neurodevelopmental disorder, the results can be truly profound.
When possible, studies of both drug treatments and psychological therapies use blind ratings of symptoms as outcome measures. Why?
To avoid unconscious biases on the part of the raters that might influence their ratings
Symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder
To be diagnosed with MDD, you need to be experiencing symptoms almost every day for at least two weeks, and these symptoms need to be more severe than the normal fluctuations in mood that we all experience in our daily lives.
cognitive psychology
We can study the mind by measuring the effects of hypothetical mental processes on behavior
In terms of both 12-month and lifetime prevalence, the most prevalent general category of mental illness is:
anxiety disorders
longitudinal studies
can track the same people over the course of many years.
Exposure therapy is an example of cognitive therapy , and it is based on laboratory studies of
extinction .
Which of the following are typical examples of "positive symptoms" in schizophrenia? [Select all that are correct.]
hallucinations, delusions, disorganized, incoherent speech
exposure therapy,
idea is to expose the patient to the fear-related stimulus under conditions where nothing bad happens. This causes the link from the stimulus to the fear response to extinguish. In most cases, the exposure builds up gradually.
bipolar 1
in bipolar I, the manic episodes are extreme, cause serious problems in daily life, and can involve hallucinations and delusions much like those seen in schizophrenia. The manic episodes are so extreme that they often lead to hospitalization.
First-generation antipsychotic
prevents binding of dopamine to dopamine receptors
in obsessive-compulsive disorder, obsessions are
recurring, intrusive thoughts
Psychology
study of both mind and behavior. It endeavors to explain how internal and external factors cause people and other organisms to think, feel, and act the way they do, and how this changes over time.
allostasis
there may not be a single ideal equilibrium because different environments require different responses, and your body should be able to flexibly adjust multiple physiological systems to support adaptive responses to constantly changing environmental demands An allostatic system allows the body to adjust not only to immediate circumstances as they happen, but also anticipate future environments on the basis of your life history
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
ttempts to impact thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In its modern incarnation, CBT is a very eclectic approach that borrows methods arising from a variety of different theories. If it works, use it.
Homeostasis
your body's tendency to maintain an ideal equilibrium or set point for your internal environment, no matter what is happening around you.
