Week 10 - Chapter 13&14

Chapter 13: What Are Psychological Disorders, and How Can We Understand Them?

How Can We Explain Abnormal Behavior?

• Biological theories suggest that behavior is a mental illness or a disease resulting from physical causes. 
• Social factors such as age, race, gender, and culture influence abnormal behavior. 
• Disorders result from a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. 

DSM Model for Classifying Abnormal Behavior

• The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is a system that describes specific criteria for a diagnosis of a mental health disorder.
• Labeling could lead to negative effects because it may cause the person to behave in a way consistent with the disorder.

Anxiety Disorders

• Anxiety disorders include physical, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. 
• Generalized anxiety disorder is characterized by excessive anxiety, worry, and difficulty in controlling such worries. 
• Panic disorder is characterized by recurrent panic attacks or the persistent fear of having a panic attack. 
• Phobic disorder is a persistent fear of a specific object or social situation. 
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder is when a person experiences repeating compulsions or obsessions that cannot be controlled. 
• Post traumatic stress disorder develops after exposure to a terrifying event.

Dissociative and Somatoform Disorders

• Dissociative disorders are characterized by a loss of awareness of some part of the self
• Somatoform disorders are characterized by physical complaints or symptoms with no apparent physical cause. 

Schizophrenic Disorders

• Schizophrenia is a chronic mental health disorder characterized by positive symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, etc.) and negative symptoms (blunted affect, alogia, etc.)
• Types include paranoid, disorganized, catonic, undifferentiated, and residual. 
• Causes include genetics, dopamine and glutamate activity, and abnormal brain functioning.

Mood Disorders

• Mood disorders are characterized by a significant change in one's emotional state over an extended period.  
• In unipolar depression, the person experiences extreme or chronic sadness or loss of pleasure.
• Bipolar disorder involves a shift in mood between two states: sadness and mania. 
• Causes include:
• Biological factors
• Psychological factors
• Social factors

What Are Personality Disorders?

• Personalities disorders consist of longstanding patterns of malfunctioning typically evident in childhood or adolescence. 
• People who disregard the rights of others without showing any remorse or guilt are diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.
• Borderline personality disorder is characterized by instability in moods, interpersonal relationship, self-image, and behavior.
• Causes could be:
• Biological factors (genetics, neurotransmitters, abnormal brain functioning)
• Psychological factors (inconsistent parenting practices, gender, conflict-filled childhood)

Chapter 14: What Therapies are Used to Treat Psychological Problems?

What is the Nature of Psychotherapy?

• Psychotherapy is administered by clinical psychologists, licensed counselors, social workers, and therapists. 
• Psychotherapists abide by ethical standards of confidentiality, competent treatment, informed consent, and appropriate interactions. 

What are the Main Types of Psychotherapy?

• Traditional psychoanalysis has clients gain insight into the underlying source of their problems. Psychodynamic therapy also relies on the therapist's interpretations of the client's feelings and behaviors but places more emphasis on current problems and interpersonal relations. 
• Humanistic therapy  includes client-centered therapy connects with and understands the client's worldview. The therapist offers genuineness, empathy, and unconditional positive regard to encourage self-exploration and self-fulfillment. 
• Behavior therapies: 
• Classical conditioning therapies use techniques such as systematic desensitization, virtual reality technology, flooding, and aversion therapy.
• Operant conditioning therapies use techniques such as shaping, extinction, positive reinforcement, and token economies. 
• Cognitive therapies:
• Rational-emotive therapy - the therapist confronts, questions, and challenges the validity of the client's irrational beliefs 
• Cognitive therapy - the therapist identifies and tracks negative automatic thoughts and has the client test the accuracy of these cognitive distortions

What Happens in Group Therapy?

• The goal of group therapy is to improve the functioning and interactions among individuals, couples, families, or other groups. 
• Less expensive than individual therapy and offers a safe mini-environment

Effective Psychotherapy: What Treatments Work?

• Generally, the different psychotherapy approaches produce relatively equivalent results in terms of client improvement. 
• The ecletic therapy approach combines multiples ways of treatment

What are the Biomedical Therapies?

• Biomedical therapies are administered by psychiatrists and other medical professionals. 
• The most common biomedical therapy is psychopharmacology, or the use of medications to treat mental health problems.
• Antianxiety medications are prescribed to reduce tension and anxiety. 
• Antipsychotic medications are prescribed to relieve psychotic symptoms such as agitation, delusions, disordered thinking, and hallucinations. 
• Antidepressants are prescribed for mood and anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and substance dependence. 
• Antimanic medications  are used primarily to treat mania. 
• Most controversial biomedical therapies include electroconvulsive therapy  and psychosurgery. In ECT, a seizure is created in the brain to treat severe depression. Psychosurgery involves surgically altering the brain to alleviate severe symptoms of Parkinson's disease or obsessive compulsive disorder. 

  

  A Little Cartoon about Psychotherapy :)

Week 9: Chapter 12: What is Personality, and How Do We Measure It?

The Psychoanalytic Approach

• Emphasizes unconscious aspects of personality. Proposes that personality operates at the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. 
• According to Freud, personality is comprised of the unconscious id that operates according to the pleasure principle, the conscious ego, and the moral directives of the superego. 

The Trait Approach

• Attempts to describe personality by identifying the internal traits
• Classified traits into three types: central, cardinal, and secondary
• Five-factory theory proposed five core universal traits
• Openness
• Conscientiouness
• Extraversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Social Cognitive Approach

• Evaluates environmental and cognitive factors that influence personality
• Reciprocal determinism suggests that personality is due to the constant interaction between one's environment, one's behavior, and one's thoughts. 

The Humanistic Approach

• Emphasizes one's drive toward uniqueness and self-actualization
• The humanistic approach promotes self-awareness and positive interactions with others. 

Measuring Personality

• Tools that assess personality should be reliable and valid. 
• Personality inventories such as the MMPI-2 are objective forms that can reliably describe a person's traits if answered honestly. 
• Projective tests are less structured. A person's responses are believed to reflect underlying unconscious concerns. 

That's all for this week! Personality, huh? Super interesting. Time to do some more homework; oh joy. Busy, busy, busy week! And happy birthday to my sister this week! :) Next Week is Chapters 13 & 14. Volleyball ended last night as well. :(

Week 8: Chapters 10 & 11

Two Chapters this week! :)

Chapter 10: Social Psychology: How Do We Understand and Interact with Others?

• Attitudes: 
• Attitudes are evaluative beliefs that contain affective, behavioral, and cognitive components. 
• Attitudes develop through the learning process
• Dissonance results from a lack of cognitive consistency; it motivates us to change either our attitudes or our behaviors.
• Persuasion occurs when someone makes a direct attempt to change our attitudes. 
• Typically, people are easier to persuade when they are processing on the peripheral route rather than the central route. 
• Forming Impressions
• When forming impressions of others, we make trait or situational attributions when we assign cause to their behavior. 
• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to overuse trait explanations during attributions. 
• Prejudice
• Prejudices are negatively biased stereotypes that are applied to all members of a social group. 
• Prejudices are learned. 
• Attraction
• Some factors include proximity, similarity, physical attractiveness, and biochemicals. 
• Groups
• Conformity is the tendency to behave in ways that are consistent with the norms or expectations of a group.
• In normative conformity, we conform to avoid breaking social norms. 
• Social facilitation occurs when we perform better in the presence of others. 
• Aggression
• Instrumental aggression is goal-directed.
• Hostile aggression is aimed at hurting others.
• Potential causes include: high levels of testosterone, lack of serotonin, brain damage, observational learning, or modeling. 
• Requests and Demands
• Compliance is giving in to a simple request.
• Foot in the door - probably going to accept a larger request after accepting a smaller request
• Door in the face - probably going to accept a smaller request after denying a larger request
• Reciprocity - feeling that we should return others' favors
• Obedience is giving in to a demand. 
• Factors include: presence of authority figure, foot-in-the-door, psychological distance.
• Prosocial Behavior
• Helping behavior is the tendency to help others with little concern of own gain
• Factors that could affect this:
• Bystander effect
• Pluralistic ignorance

Chapter 11: Health, Stress, and Coping: How Can You Create a Healthy Life?

• Stress
• Stress is any event or environmental stimulus that we respond to because we perceive it as challenging or threatening. 
• Catastrophes and significant life events are major stressors. Daily hassles are less serious, but can have a negative effect on health. 
• The Stress Response
• Our body responds to stress in a three-phase general adaption syndrome:
• The Alarm Reaction (Body responses)
• Resistance Stage (Body continues to ope, bodily reactions are less intense)
• Exhaustion Phase (Wear and tear on the body)
• Coping with Stress
• Coping is how we manage a threatening event or stimulus.
• Problem-focused coping controls or alters the environment that caused the stress.
• Emotion-focused controls out internal, subjective, emotional responses to stress.
• Personality and Stress
• Type-A personality: aggressive, competitive, driven to achieve.
• Type-B personality: relaxed, easygoing, patient, and flexible
• Type-C Personality: careful and patient, suppresses negative emotions
• Hardy personality: resistant to stress
• Behaviors and Well-Being
• Health-defeating behaviors increase the chance of illness, disease, or death.
• Health-promoting behaviors decrease the chance of illness, disease, or death. 

Woo-hoo! Almost done with the class! Got my final project done and really focused on finishing strong! :) I've really enjoyed psychology though; it helped me narrow down my interests. Chapter 12 next week! ...Also, I'm really paranoid that I've done these blogs all wrong, and I'm nervous about my grade in this class. Hopefully all goes well! I'm getting super busy, so maybe I'm just stressed out. 

Feels like me this week. :/ :)

Week 7 - Chapter 9: How Do People Grow, Change, and Develop?

What is development? Development includes changes in physical, emotional, social, and cognitive behavior and abilities over time through an interaction of nature and nurture.

Prenatal Development: The germinal stage: the zygote undergoes rapid cell division and duplication. The embryonic stage: major organs and organ systems form. Fetal Stage: body organs and systems more fully develop.

Differences in Physical Development: Infant's brains are highly changeable. Reflexes such as sucking, rooting, and grasping help the infant survive. Gross motor skills develop and allow the child to run, walk, jump and hop. Fine motor skills develop and aid activities such as writing, using utensils, and playing a musical instrument.

Differences in Cognitive Development: According to Jean Piaget, infants and children apply schemas to understand their environment and adapt to change through accommodation when existing schemas are changed or modified. Lawrence Kohlberg's research on moral reasoning suggests that children's understanding of right and wrong develops progressively from a focus on the self to the external world.

Psychosocial Development: An infant's temperament can influence the attachment between the infant and the primary caregiver. Diana Baumrind identified three styles of parenting: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Children also process and develop schemas about gender roles.

Development in Adolescence and Adulthood: Puberty is the maturation of sex characteristics that enables us to reproduce. At around age 50, women experience menopause and hormonal changes that bring an end to reproductive capacity. During adolescence, the brain remains highly changeable. Teenagers tend to be egocentric.

Coping with Death and Dying: Death is a process rather than a point in time, and is inevitable part of our development. There have been five reactions identified that may characterize people who know they are dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. 

That's it for this week folks! :)

Prenatal Development - I LOVE learning about this kind of stuff. Really interests me. :)
Picture Courtesy of: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/vanm0049/myblog/2011/11/fetal-development-and-obstacles.html 

Week 7 - Chapter 8: Motivation and Emotion: What Guides Our Behavior?

What is a motive? A motive is the tendency to desire and seek out positive incentives and rewards and to avoid negative outcomes.

How Do Psychologists View Motivation? William James that most motives were inborn instincts. According to the drive reduction theory, primary drives maintain homeostasis. Arousal theories suggest that we all have different optimal levels of arousal. Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs in which some needs take priority over others.

Hunger: What Makes Us Eat? Receptors in the stomach monitor the intake of food and contractions of the stomach, and signal the brain when to make us hungry or to shut off hunger. Obesity can be caused by biological factors, such as a slow metabolism, as well as a number of behavioral factors, such as poor diet, excessive food intake, and emotional eating. Eating disorders:anorexia nervosa involves extreme concern about gaining weight and reduction in caloric intake that leads to drastic weight loss. Bulimia nervosa involves bingeing on food followed by purging or drastic reduction in caloric intake to rid the body of the extra calories. Binge eating disorder involves bingeing on food without compensatory measures to rid the body of extra calories.

Sexual Desire: is influenced by neurotransmitters, hormones, sensory ques, and cultural attitudes. The sexual response cycle includes excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution phases. Sexual orientation can be heterosexual (other sex), bisexual (both sexes), or homosexual (same sex). Homophobia is prejudice against homosexuals and bisexuals. \

Theories & Expression of Emotion Components of emotion include physiological reactions, behavioral reactions, facial expressions, cognition, and affective response. Theories of Emotion include the James-Lange theory (emotion is a physiological response to a stimulus) Cannon-Bard theory (emotion occurs in the brain, response to a situation), facial feedback hypothesis (emotion occurs by the feedback the brain receives from muscles in the face), two-factor theory (emotions are a product of both physiological arousal and cognitive interpretations of this arousal), and the cognitive-meditational theory (cognitive appraisal of a situation determines what emotion we feel). Basic emotions include happiness, sadness, anger, and fear are present across cultures. Display rules determine the appropriate expression of emotion in a culture. This week is continued on Week 7 - Chapter 9: How Do People Grow, Change, and Develop?

A Fun Little Diagram of Theories of Emotion :)
Courtesy of http://employees.csbsju.edu/ltennison/PSYC111/M&E.htm. 

Week 6 - Cognition, Language, and Intelligence: How Do We Think?

Thinking: Cognition is the way we store and use information. Knowledgeises the mental representations of the world we have stored in long-term memory. Thinking is the use of knowledge to accomplish a goal. Concepts are mental categories. Three levels of catergorization: superordinate (broad), basic level category, and the superordinate (most specific).

Reasoning, Decision Making, and Judgement: Deductive reasoning means reasoning from the general to the specific, whereas inductive reasoning means reasoning from the specific to the general. Decision making means choosing among several alternatives.

Problem Solving: Algorithm is a way of solving a well-structured problem that always leads to the correct solution. A heuristic is a shortcut that may or may not lead to the solution. Ill-structured problems must be solved by heuristics. Insight, creativity, and incubation help us overcome common obstacles to problem solving such as functional fixedness and mental sets.

Lanugage: Research indicates that infants generally proceded from cooing to babbling to morphemes. The Whorfian hypothesis sugguests that language determines one's thoughts sand perceptions of the world.

Intelligence: Alfred Binet established the measurement of mental age that reflected a child's mental abililtes compared to the average. Lewis Terman revised these testing procedures and introduced the intelligence quotient (Or IQ), which is obtained by dividing one's mental age by one's chronological age.

I accomplished a lot this week, but if I don't hurry and close this, I'm going to miss my bus for the volleyball game! Next week will be two chapters based on motivation and development1 :)

Week 5 - How Do We Learn? & How Does Memory Function?

Chapter 5

Habituation: Orienting reflexes allow us to respond to unexpected stimuli. Habituation allows us to stop responding to stimuli that are repeated over and over. Dishabituation allows us to re-respond to a stimulus to which we were previously habituated.

Classical Conditioning: Occurs when a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus that reliably causes an unconditioned response, and because of this association, the neutral stimulus loses its neutrality and becomes a conditioned response that elicts the conditoned response. Is most effective when the neutral stimulus/conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus are separated only by a brief period of time and the pairing must reliably predict the response. Stimulus generalization occurs when we respond to similar stimuli with the same conditioned response. Stimulus discrimination occurs when the conditioned response is only elicited by a particular conditioned response. Extinction is the elimination of a conditioned response.

Operant Conditioning: We learn from the consequences of our actions. E.L. Thorndike developed the law of effect, which emphasized the negative and positive consequences of behavior. B.F. Skinner coined the term "operant conditioning".

Observational learning is learning that occurs by observing others and modeling their behavior.

Chapter 6 Functions of Memory: The brain encodes, stores, and processes information. This can be explicit (consciously) or implicit (unconsciously).

Long term memory is organized into schemas, which allow us to effectively use our memory.

Forgetting: may be due to decay, interference, cue-dependent forgetting, or even repression.

Flashbulb memories are unusually detailed memories for emotionally charged events. We are prone to many memory errors, including the misinformation effect.

This Week I Accomplished: Read Chapter 5 & 6, 4 discussion posts, 2 C&R's, 2 quizzes, 3 tweets, and a blog posting. Also accomplished: Homecoming Week! Plus 2 volleyball games and a tournament. Went line dancing, and got all of my regular homework done too!

Next Week: Chapter 7 - Cognition, Language, and Intelligence: How Do We Think? :)

Reference: What is Psychology? Essentials, Second Edition by Ellen Pastorino and Susann Doyle-Portillo. 2013: Cengage Learning.

Three Stages Model of Memory (and how alcohol affects it!)