Psychology: Composition of Mind and Cognitive Disorders

Composition of Mind

• The mind consists of three components: Intellect, Affect, and Behavior
• Intellect: includes mental processes like thought, perception, orientation, memory, attention, concentration, judgment, insight, general knowledge, intelligence, and consciousness
• Affect: refers to the emotional state of an individual, including inner feelings and experiences
• Behavior: refers to the conduct of an individual

Disorder of Cognition

• Formal Thought Disorder:
  • Autistic thinking: thinking that gratifies unfulfilled desires but has no regard for reality
  • Concrete thinking: thinking that is literal and lacks understanding of implicit meanings
• Disorder of the Stream of Thinking:
  • Tangentiality: going off the topic and not returning to it
  • Circumstantiality: getting caught up in details before getting to the point
  • Looseness of association: illogical and haphazard connections between ideas
  • Flight of ideas: rapid jumping from one idea to another
  • Clang association: choosing words based on sound
  • Incoherence or word salad: mixture of words and phrases with no meaning
  • Pressure of speech: sudden and rapid speech
  • Poverty of speech: brief and uncommunicative speech
  • Retardation: slow speech and prolonged latent period before response
  • Blocking: sudden cessation of thought in the middle of a sentence
  • Perseveration: repeated word or idea in response to different questions
  • Pallilalia: repeated last word said
  • Echolalia: repeating someone else's speech
  • Irrelevant answer: answer that is not in harmony with the question asked
  • Neologisms: made-up words with meaning only to the individual

Disorder of Content of Thought

• Delusions:
  • False fixed beliefs not in harmony with the individual's educational and cultural background
  • Types of delusions:
    • Paranoid delusions (e.g. grandeur, persecution, reference)
    • Delusions of influence (e.g. control, hypochondria)
    • Depressive delusions (e.g. self-blame, guilt, sin)
    • Bizarre delusions
• Obsessive thoughts:
  • Persistent, ritualized thoughts, images, or words that intrude against the individual's will
  • Serve to reduce anxiety
• Suicidal ideation:
  • Recurrent ideas of ending one's life

Disorder of Perception

• Hallucinations:
  • False perceptions with no external stimuli
  • Can occur in any of the five senses (seeing, hearing, touch, taste, and smell)
• Illusions:
  • False perceptions with an external stimulus
  • Can affect any of the special senses
• Depersonalization:
  • Sense of unreality or self-estrangement
• Derealization:
  • False perception of the environment as changed

Disorder of Memory

• Amnesia:
  • Loss of memory, can be partial or complete
  • Types of amnesia:
    • Anterograde amnesia: loss of memory for recent events
    • Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory for remote events
    • Total amnesia: loss of memory for both recent and remote events
    • Circumscribed amnesia (amnesic gap): loss of memory for a limited time
• Paramnesia:
  • False recall or disorder in recalling process
  • Types of paramnesia:
    • Confabulation: filling gaps in memory with fabrication
    • Falsification: adding false details to a true memory
• Hypermnesia:
  • Excessive memory, including unnecessary details
• De' Ja' VU:
  • Feeling of having already experienced a situation
• Jamais VU:
  • Feeling of unfamiliarity with a familiar situation

Disorder of Orientation

• Disorientation:
  • Impaired ability to identify time, place, and person

Disorder of Judgment

• Impaired judgment:
  • Lack of ability to assess a situation correctly and act appropriately

Disorder of Insight

• Impaired insight:
  • Lack of ability to understand the objective condition of one's illness

Disorders of Affect/Mood

• Inappropriate (incongruent) affect: a mismatch between emotional response and situation
• Pleasurable affect: a heightened feeling of psychological wellbeing, including:
• Euphoria: happiness with confidence and enjoyment, increased motor activity
• Elation: intense elation with feelings of grandeur and sarcasm
• Exaltation: intense happiness with a mysterious air, often associated with mystical experiences or drug use
• Ecstasy: a subjective experience of intense happiness
• Depressive affect: feelings of sadness, including:
• Depression: a psychopathological feeling of sadness
• Grief or mourning: a feeling of sadness appropriate to a real loss
• Inadequate affect: abnormal emotional responses, including:
• Restricted or constricted affect: superficial emotional reactions
• Apathy: absence of emotional experience and expression
• Indifference: absence of emotional expression, but experience is present
• Ambivalence: holding two opposing emotions, attitudes, or ideas towards the same person, situation, or object
• Labile mood: rapidly shifting emotions, not related to external stimuli
• Irritable mood: easily annoyed and provoked to anger

Anxiety and Related Emotions

• Anxiety: a state of uncertainty, uneasiness, or dread from an unknown or unrecognized threat
• Panic: overwhelming anxiety, disorganization of personality, loss of rational thought, and physiological changes
• Fear: a reaction to a specific danger
• Phobia: an intense, irrational fear of an object, situation, or place, leading to avoidance

Disorders of Behavior

• Normal activity: performing daily living activities within a normal range
• Hyperactivity: excessive motor activity, including:
• Restlessness: subjective feeling of uneasiness, tension, and inability to sit still
• Psychomotor agitation: excessive motor and cognitive overactivity
• Excitement: severe hyperactivity with purposeless motor activity, loss of control
• Psychomotor retardation: slowed motor activity
• Repetitive activity:
• Stereotypy: monotonous repetition of movement without purpose
• Mannerism: repeated movement, not monotonous, characteristic of personality
• Perseveration: voluntary repetition of the same motor response
• Echopraxia: imitating the movements of another person

Catatonic and Postural Abnormalities

• Waxy flexibility: maintenance of imposed postures, without fatigue
• Catalepsy (catatonic posturing): voluntary assumption of an inappropriate or bizarre posture
• Negativism: frequent opposition to suggestion, in motor, speech, or visceral sphere
• Automatic obedience: performance of simple commands in a robot-like fashion
• Impulsiveness: sudden, unplanned actions directed towards immediate gratification of needs
• Compulsion: senseless, persistent, repetitive behavior performed purposefully to release tension or anxiety