Psychology: Recognizing Normal and Abnormal Behavior

Normality and Abnormality

• Recognizing normal and abnormal manifestations of behavior:
  • Psychological disorder: associated with distress or impairment in functioning and a response that is not typical or culturally expected.
  • 4 D's of psychological disorder:
    • Dysfunction: breakdown in cognitive, emotional, or behavioral functioning.
    • Distress or impairment: individual is extremely upset and cannot function properly.
    • Deviance: deviates from the average or the norm of the culture.
    • Dangerousness: creates potential harm to self or others.

Criteria for Determining Abnormal Behavior

• Normal behavior: one that is like other people in society.
• Normality:
  • Is social conformity.
  • Is personal comfort.
  • Is a process.
• Criteria for determining abnormal behavior:
  • Norm-violation.
  • Statistical rarity.
  • Personal discomfort.
  • Deviation.
  • Maladaptiveness.

Clinical Assessment and Diagnosis

• Clinical assessment: systematic evaluation and measurement of psychological, biological, and social factors.
• Diagnosis: process of determining whether a problem meets all criteria for a psychological disorder.
• Epidemiology: study of the distribution of diseases, disorders, or health-related behaviors.
• Prevalence:
  • Number of active cases in a population during a given period.
  • Point prevalence: proportion of actual cases in a population at a given point.
  • 1-year prevalence: everyone who experienced a disorder at any point in time throughout the entire year.
  • Lifetime prevalence: estimate of people who have had a disorder at any time in their lives.

DSM-IV Axis

• Axis I: Clinical disorder.
• Axis II: Personality disorders and mental retardation.
• Axis III: General medical conditions.
• Axis IV: Psychosocial and environmental problems.

Abnormal Psychology

• Disorders:
  • Agoraphobia: developed after a person has unexpected panic attacks, fear in two or more situations.
  • Generalized anxiety disorder: excessive anxiety and worry occurring more days than not for at least 6 months.
  • Posttraumatic stress disorder: exposure to actual death, injury, or sexual violence.
  • Acute stress disorder: exposure to trauma, 3 days to 1 month after trauma exposure.
  • Adjustment disorder: development of emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to identifiable stressors.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

• Obsessions: intrusive and mostly nonsensical thoughts, images, or urges.
• Compulsions: thoughts or actions used to suppress the obsessions and provide relief.
• Sensory phenomena: physical experiences that precede compulsions.
• Common features:
  • Avoid people, places, and things that trigger OC.
  • Accommodation: involvement of family and friends in compulsive rituals.
  • Risks: perinatal events, premature birth, tobacco use during pregnancy, sexual and physical abuse.

Body Dysmorphic Disorder

• Preoccupation with some imagined defect.
• Imagined ugliness.
• Associated with high levels of anxiety, social avoidance, depressed mood, and perfectionism.
• Can be co-morbid with eating disorders, MDD, social anxiety, and substance-related disorders.

Hoarding

• Difficulty discarding or parting with possessions.
• Associated with indecisiveness, perfectionism, avoidance, and procrastination.

Excoriation

• Skin-picking.
• Note delusion or tactile hallucination.

Somatic Symptom Disorder

• One or more symptoms cause distress and disruption of daily life.
• Chronic, influenced by the number of symptoms, age, level of impairment, and comorbidity.

Anxiety Disorders

• Separation anxiety disorder: concerns with real or imagined separating from attachment figures.
• Selective mutism: rare childhood disorder, characterized by a lack of speech in one or more setting.
• Specific phobia: irrational fear of a specific object or situation.
• Social anxiety disorder: fear or anxiety about possible embarrassment or scrutiny.
• Panic disorder: cannot be diagnosed unless full symptom panic attacks were experienced.

Lewinsohn's Behavioral Theory

• Depression is caused by a combination of stressors and a lack of personal skills.
• Diathesis-stress model: individuals inherit tendencies to express certain traits or behaviors, which may then be activated under conditions of stress.

Gene-Environment Interaction

• Gene-environment correlation model: people might have genetically determined tendency to create the environment risk factors that trigger a genetic vulnerability.
• Epigenetics: study of how behavior and environment can cause changes that affect genes work.
• Reciprocal gene-environment model: claims that people with a genetic predisposition to a disorder may also have a genetic tendency to create environmental factors that promote the disorder.

Levels-of-Processing Theory

• Degree to which new materials is mentally analyzed.
• Implicit memory: can be recalled automatically without thinking.
• Explicit memory: requires conscious retrieval of information.

Forgetting

• Permits us to form general impressions and recollections.
• Helps us avoid being burdened and distracted by trivial stores of meaningless data.
• Failure of encoding: failure to pay attention and place information in memory.
• Decay: loss of information due to non-use.
• Cue-dependent forgetting: insufficient retrieval cues.

Interference

• Proactive interference: learned earlier disrupts the recall of newer material.
• Retroactive interference: difficulty in recalling info learned earlier because of later exposure to different material.

Learned Helplessness

• If they learn that nothing they do helps them avoid the shocks, they eventually become helpless, give up, and manifest an animal equivalent of depression.

• Anxiety is the first response to a stressful situation.

• The depressive attributional style is internal, stable, and global.### Abnormal Psychology: Depression

• Depression may result from a tendency to interpret everyday events in a negative way, leading to cognitive errors in thinking negatively about oneself, their immediate world, and their future.

Suicide

• Genetic makeup may affect the reactions of other people to a child, influencing the kind of social environment they will experience.
• Active Gene-Environment Interaction: children's genotype influences the kinds of environment they seek.

Sociogenic Factors

• Unemployment
• Poverty
• Crime
• Poor Educational Level

Social Interactions and Interpersonal Factors

• People who are isolated and lack social support or intimacy in their lives are more likely to become depressed when under stress and to remain depressed longer.
• People's online relationships tend to parallel their offline relationships.

Family Systems Theory

• Family is a system of interacting parts who interact with one another in consistent ways and follow rules unique to each family.
• Structure and communication patterns of some families can force individual members to behave in a way that otherwise seems abnormal.

Multicultural Perspective

• Each culture within a large society has a particular set of values and beliefs, as well as special external pressures, that help account for the behavior and functioning of its members.
• An individual's behavior, whether normal or abnormal, is best understood in the light of the individual's unique cultural context.

Types of Suicide

• Death Seekers: clearly intend to end their lives at the time they attempt suicide, may last only a short time.
• Death Initiators: clearly intend to end their lives, but they act out of a belief that the process is already underway and that they are simply hastening the process.
• Death Ignorers: do not believe that they are attempting to end their lives, even though they engage in self-destructive behaviors.