Personality Disorders Overview Quiz

Abnormal Psychology: Personality Disorders

• Personality refers to enduring characteristics and behaviors that comprise a person's unique adjustments to life, including traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns.
• Personality disorder is a persistent pattern of emotions, cognitions, and behaviors that result in enduring distress for the affected individual and/or others, potentially causing work and relationship difficulties.

Categorical and Dimensional Models

• Categorical model: identifies a disorder's presence or absence of symptoms; for example, either anxious or not anxious.
• Dimensional model: ranks a disorder on a continuous quantitative dimension; for example, a scale of 1-10 for anxiety. The DSM is categorical.

Personality Disorder Clusters

• Cluster A (odd/eccentric): Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal
• Cluster B (dramatic, emotional, erratic): Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic
• Cluster C (anxious/fearful): Avoidant, Dependent, Obsessive-Compulsive

Specific Personality Disorders (Examples)

• Paranoid Personality Disorder: Characterized by pervasive distrust and suspicion of others; individuals interpret others' motives as malevolent.
• Schizoid Personality Disorder: Marked by detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of emotions, appearing aloof and indifferent to others. Individuals with this disorder often lack interest in close relationships and have little enjoyment in activities.
• Schizotypal Personality Disorder: Individuals are often considered odd or bizarre due to their unusual or odd thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and appearance. The disorder overlaps with schizophrenia but doesn't meet the full criteria for the illness.
• Antisocial Personality Disorder: Individuals have a history of failing to comply with social norms and engaging in unacceptable behavior like stealing, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and deceit. They are often aggressive and unconcerned about the impact on others. Often associated with conduct disorder in childhood.
• Borderline Personality Disorder: Characterized by unstable moods, relationships, and self-image, along with impulsivity, suicidal behaviors, self-mutilation, and intense emotions (e.g., anger to depression).
• Histrionic Personality Disorder: Individuals are overly dramatic, need attention, and express emotions in an exaggerated manner. They are often vain, self-centered, and may use seductive behavior to gain attention.
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Individuals have an unreasonable sense of self-importance and are preoccupied with themselves. They need admiration, have exaggerated feelings of greatness, show little empathy, and may exploit others.
• Avoidant Personality Disorder: Individuals are sensitive to the opinions of others, desire relationships but have anxiety about rejection. Low self-esteem and dependent on those they feel comfortable with.
• Dependent Personality Disorder: Individuals rely on others to make decisions and for most areas of their lives. They have fear of abandonment and go to extremes to get support from others.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder: Individuals are preoccupied with orderliness, perfectionism, and control, often at the expense of flexibility and openness. They have difficulty with delegation and may hold excessively rigid moral values.

Prevalence and Course

• Statistics regarding prevalence (in clinical and general populations) and course (e.g., chronic vs. dissipating) for specific personality disorders are described.
• Data include approximately equal gender distributions for some disorders, while others demonstrate variations in prevalence between genders.

Diagnostic Overlap

• There's overlap in diagnostics for certain personality disorders, indicated by odds ratios. Higher odds ratios suggest a greater likelihood of multiple diagnoses.

Activity

• Analyze fictional characters for the presence of personality disorders.