Introduction to Psychological Theories
What is psychological science?
The study, through research, of mind, brain and behaviour.
What is amiable skepticims?
A combination of openness and wariness, someone who is open to new ideas but wary of new scientific findings when evidence and reasoning do not seem to support them.
How do mental activity and the brain relate?
Mental activity is produced by biochemical processes in the brain.
What is critical thinking?
Systemically questioning and evaluating information using well-supported evidence.
What is confirmation bias?
People are inclined to overweigh evidence that supports their beliefs and tend to downplay evidence that does not match what they believe.
What are common biases that lead to poor judgement?
Ignoring evidence, seeing causal relationships that do not exist, accepting after-the-fact explanations, taking mental shortcuts (heuristics)
What is the availability heuristic?
When things that come most easily to mind guide our thinking. Eg: people tend to think sharks kill more people than horses do simply because shark attacks come to mind first.
What is optimism bias?
The tendency to think we are better than others, or that we are at least better than average.
What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
People lack the ability to evaluate their own performance in areas where they lack expertise. People are often unaware of their weaknesses because they cannot judge those weaknesses at all.
Eg: people who get lower scores on exams think they scored higher than they actually did while people with higher scores are better at judging what their scores are.
What is the mind/body problem?
Are the mind and body separate and distinct, or is the mind simply the subjective experience of ongoing brain activity?
What is the nature/nurture debate and what is the concensus about it now a days?
Are psychological characteristics biologically innate or are they acquired through education, experience and culture?
We now recognise that nature and nurture dynamically interact in human psychological development.
What is dualism?
A theory proposed by Descartes that refers to the idea that the mind and the body are separate yet intertwined. The body is governed by reflex while the mind controls deliberate actions.
What is structuralism? What is a test used for stucturalism?
this approach states that complex mental processes can be reduced to simpler processes.
The Stroop test is used.
What is functionalism?
The mind is too complex to understand simply as the sum of separate parts. Psychologists have to examine the functions served by the mind. The mind came into existence over the course of human evolution and it helps us adapt to our environment.
What area of psychology deals with understanding basic skills and processes that are the foundation of mental life and behaviour?
Cognitive psychology
What area of psychology deals with how psychological processes influence physical health and vice versa?
Health psychology
Which area of psychology deals with the study of everyday thoughts, feelings and behaviours and the factors that give rise to them?
Social-personality psychology
What school of thought believes that mental processes operate below the level of conscious awareness?
Psychoanalytic approach
What school of thought believes only observable behaviour can be the subject of scientific investigation?
Behaviourism
What is gestalt?
This theory believes that a few basic principles guide visual perception which explain how visual input is grouped into a coherent whole.
What psychological approach focuses on the basic goodness in people, achieving goals and finding fulfilment?
Humanistic psychology
What approach to psychology explores mental processes with brain imaging?
Cognitivism
Why is genetics and epigenetics useful in psychology?
It gives us foundational knowledge for studying how specific genes affect thoughts, actions, feelings and disorders. Also, most aspects of human psychology have some genetic component
What relationships does the gut biome have with brain function, structure and development?
There are deep connections between our mind and other systems in the body. There is a two-way relation between the gut microbiome and our mind and behaviour
What effect has big data had on pyschology?
Using tools from the computer science world we can identify patterns in large data sets and the availability of these very large data sets has increased the diversity of samples
What are cultural norms?
Socially upheld rules regarding how people ought to behave in certain situations
What techniques have been shown to help in learning?
Distributed practice, retreival-based learning (being tested), elaborative interrogation (thinking through why something is true), self-explanation (expalining something in your own terms) and interleaved practice (switiching between topics)
What is learning?
An enduring change in behaviour that results from experience
What type of learning is habituation and sensitization?
Non-associative
Trains going by your house may disturb your sleep but after a while of living there you stop waking up to the sound of trains. What type of learning is this?
Habituation
What is classical conditioning?
A neutral stimulus elicits a response because it has become associated with a stimulus that naturally produced that response. Learning that one event predicts another.
What raises the predictive value of a stimulus?
The contitioned stimulus precedes the unconcitioned stimulus, there are repeated pairings of the stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus, there is no better predictors of this stimulus.
What causes extinction of a conditioned response?
if there is a repeated exposure to the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus
What is prediction error?
There is sometimes a difference between the expected and the actual outcomes. Positive prediction errors happen when the stimulus is presented and there is a reward more valuable than expected and negative prediction errors happen when the reward presented is less valuable.
What is the difference between generalisation and discrimination?
Generalisation is when stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus produce the conditioned response and discrimination is when an animal learns to distinguish between two similar stimuli, one of which predicts the unconditioned stimulus and the other does not.
Will any stimulus pair lead to conditioning equally easily?
No, conditioning occurs more easily for stimulus pairs that are relevant for survival. Such as conditioned taste aversion
What do we mean by biological preparedness?
Animals are genetically programmed to fear certain objects
What are some conditioned drug effects?
The act of taking drugs becomes associated with the drug's effects.
Environmental cues associated with taking the drug lead to a tolerance increase becayse the body prepares to for drug intake
How is operant conditioning different to classical conditioning?
In operant conditioning we are responding for a stimulus instead of responding to a stimulus. In operant conditioning we have to operate something in our environment to produce an effect.
What is the Law of effect?
Behaviours followed by a satisfying consequence are more likely to be repeated in the future. Behaviours followed by a discomforting consequence are less likely to be repeated in the future.
What do we call a consequence that increases the chance of a behaviour occurring again in the future?
Reinforcement
What do we call a consequence that decreases the chance of a behaviour occurring again in the future?
Punishment
True or false: punishment is more effective than reinforcement.
False
Which one is more sensitive to timing issues, punishment or reinforcement?
Punishment
What is shaping?
The reinforcement of behaviours that are increasingly similar to the desired behaviour
What is temporal discounting?
When the value of a reward diminishes over time; a reward in the future is perceived as less valuable than an immediate reward.
Why does partical reinforcement lead to greater persistence of behaviour when the reinforcement is not provided anymore?
Because the learner needs to repeat the behaviour more times to detect the absence of a reinforcement so the behaviour resists extinction.
What is the difference between modelling and vicarious learning?
Modelling is when we imitate a behaviour someone else does and vicarious learning is when we observe the consequences of a certain behaviour in someone else to see if it is punished or reinforced.
What do we describe as thinking?
the mental manipulation of representations
What is automatic thinking?
It is thinking that is fast, intuitive and low effort and relies on heuristics.
What is categorisation in thinking?
It is categorising objects into groups with shared properties. It makes the world orderly and predictable.
What are the two leading models that describe the way people make concepts?
The prototype model = the best example of a concept to which we compare other objects to see if they fit into this concept.
The exemplar model = all examples we have encountered make up the concept together.
What is a schema and what is it useful for?
Schemas are cognitive frameworks that help us perceive, organise and understand information. They help us organise our world, they are very functional and are a form of shared social knowledge. Activating one concept makes related concepts more accessible automatically.
What are some of the different ways people experience thinking?
Inner speech, inner seeing, feeling, sensory awareness, unsymbolised thinking.
What role do heuristics play in making decisions?
They are simple decision rules so they do not take much effort but this can lead to mistakes.
How do emotions inform decision making?
They inform the choice of value, we weigh how different choices make us feel.
What is affective forecasting? What are some drawback of it?
Choosing to do things because they will make us happy in the future. However, we are very bad at predicting our future feelings and we tend to overestimate the positive effects of positive experiences on our happiness and the negative effects of negative experiences on our happiness. Usually happy things do not make us as happy as we expected and we cope better with negative situations than we think we do.
How do unrelated affective states influence decision making?
The mood we are in when taking a decision can affect our decision, especially when we do not know why we are in a certain mood.
What is functional fixedness?
Having fixed ideas about the typical functions of objects, which can create difficulties in problem solving.
What are the main ways of approaching problem solving?
Identifying subgoals, finding conscious trategies, restructuring the problem, working backwards
Intelligence is considered as a single factor which is composed of crystallised and fluid intelligence. What is this factor called?
Generalised intelligence, g
What is fluid intelligence?
The capacity to reason and the ability to learn new things and solve problems. It decreases with age
What is crystallised intelligence?
Knowledge gained through experience and the ability to use the stored knowledge. It increases with age
What factors determine intelligence?
Genetic factors: these explain about 50% of variance in intelligence.
Environmental factors: Breastfeeding, socioeconomic status, intellectual opportunities, schooling,
What life outcomes can an IQ test predict?
academic performance, job performance, income, health, longevity, ...
What factors have the greatest correlation to general intelligence?
Quick reaction times and working memory capacity, especially in tasks that require secondary processing (components of a test that are distracting you from the task at hand)
What are morphemes?
Smallest units of language that have meaning, including prefixes and suffixes.
What are phonemes?
The basic sounds of speech. Each morpheme consists of one or more phonemes.
What is aphasia?
Language disorder that results in deficits in language comprehension and production.
What is the left frontal areas of the brain that is responsible for speech production called?
Broca’s area
The left hemisphere of the brain has an area that controls speech comprehension. What is this area called?
Wernicke's area
What is the linguistic relativity theory?
A theory that believes language determines thought and that we can only think through language. This is not true because people without language are capable of thought; rather, language influences rather than determines thought
Up to what age can babies discriminate between all phonemes in all languages?
Up to 6 months
What is telegraphic speech?
This is when babies use rudimentary sentences that are missing words and grammatical markers but follow logical syntax and convey meaning.
What is Chomsky's universal grammar theory?
A theory of language development suggests that people are born with a specialised language acquisition device in their brains that allows us to learn any language. This theory also says that all languages include similar elements (verbs, nouns) but they are arranged differently.
what are the differences between phonics approaches and whole language approaches in teaching reading?
Phonics method = teaches the association between letters and the phonemes they represent. Better for reading proficiency.
Whole language approaches = learning the meanings of words and understanding how these are connected in sentences. Learning to read in the way they learn to talk. Better to motivate students to read.
What is an emotion?
An immediate, specific negative or positive response to environmental events or internal thoughts that prompt changes to thoughts or behaviours.
What is a mood?
A subtle, diffuse, long-lasting emotional states with no specific trigger.
What is the difference between primary and secondary emotions?
Primary emotions are innate, instinctual and evolutionariy, they are universal emotions. Secondary emotions are more complex combinations of primary emotions and are more culture-specific.
How are emotions plotted in the circumplex model? What are some shortcomings of this model?
They are plotted on the dimensions of valence (positive - negative) and arousal (how activating they are). Moree complex emotions cannot be plotted because they can be both positive and negative at the same time.
How are the amygdala and the insula involved in understanding emotions?
The insula is specifically active when we experience disgust and the amygdala is very important for emotional learning and fear responses.
Are emotional events more likely to be stored in memory?
Yes, so we remember harmful situations and can avoid them.
What theory says that every emotion has a distinct physical pattern and this pattern is what causes us to recognise the emotion?
James-Lange theory
What is the facial feedback hypothesis and what theory does it support?
This hypothesis says that changing one’s facial expression changes their emotional state. This is used as support for the James-Lange theory
What theory that arousal and emotion occur simultaneously, and separately, in response to a stimulus?
Cannon-Bard theory
What support is there for the Cannon-Bard theory?
Cognitive processes can affect emotions so emotions do not only come from arousal.
We cannot quickly determine which emotion we are experiencing from bodily responses.
Some emotions have very similar physical patterns of arousal.
What theory says that the physical reaction is essentially the same for every emotion but we interpret them differently depending on the situation and then we give them a label?
Schachter-Singer two-factor theory
What proof is there for the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory?
The misattibution of arousal, which is when the physical state caused by a situation are attributed to the wrong emotion. This has also been shown for the epinephrine study.
What are some ways we use to try to control our emotions?
Suppression, reappraising, self-distancing, finding humour, refocusing your attention, distracting yourself
Why are emotions important?
They are highly adaptive, hey prepare us for action and communicate dangers and signal waht we need. They are also important for managing relationships, showing we care and avoiding embarassment.
Why are polygraphs not very reliable as lie detectors?
They determine a person’s level of autonomic arousal in order to detect lying, but this arousal is not specific for lying so people may be telling the truth and they are just nervous or scared.
What varies more between cultures, emotional expressions or emotional experiences?
Emotional expressions vary more than experiences, we all experience similar emotions but we may show them differently.
What are display rules?
Social rules dictating which emotions are suitable in situations
What is ideal affect?
The emotions that are most appreciated in a culture.
Eg: Westerners appreciate high arousal emotions (excitement) while asian cultures tend to appreciate low arousal emotions more (calm)
What is the difference between a need and a drive?
A need is a state of biological, social or psychological deficiency, while a drive is a psychological state that creates arousal to motivate an organism to satisfy a need.
What is motivation?
A process that energises, guides, and maintains behaviour towards a goal.
What is the difference between motivation and drive?
A drive is when we are in a state of arousal due to a need and we do something to reduce the arousal. But motivation is not all about reducing arousal caused by drives, we also have motivation to pursue long-term goals, rewards and outcomes.
What things motivate us?
Basic survival needs, social and psychological needs, incentives and goals
Why is the need to belong so important?
It is highly adaptive and has many positive outcomes. We get social support, both instumental and emotional, we are dependant on each other for survival therefore belonging to a group and not being isolated was very important.
What are self-enhancement motives?
We are motivated to view ourselves positively, we focus on positive information about ourselves, often leading to bias.
What are self-verification motives?
We have a desire for coherent and stable self-views, we seek to confirm our self-concept even when it is negative.
What are incentives?
External objects or goals rather than internal drives that motivate us to do something.
What happens wehn we reward people for things that they are intrinsically motivated to do?
They start doing less of thos things, extrinsic rewards undermine intrinsic motivation.
What factors of a goal influence our motivation?
The type of goal (better if challenging and specific), focus during the goal pursuit (focusing on the proess is best), self efficacy (believing our efforts can result in success), grit (ability to persevere when there are hardships) and the ability to delay gratification.
What do we define as well-being?
A positive state that includes striving for optimal health and life satisfaction.
What is the biopsychosocial model?
A model of health that integrates the effects of biological, behavioural and social factors on health and illness.
How are relationships realted to health?
They are critical to health. People find it easier to change behaviours when their family or partner also change with them. We also learn from the people around us, care what they think and want to live up to their expectations.
What do we call the differences in health outcomes between groups of people? What are they usually due to?
Health disparities. They are usually due to people belonging to different racial and ethnic groups.
What is the socioeconomic status health gradient?
It is the fact that people with lower socioeconomic status have worse health than people with higher socioeconomic status, even when accounting for access to health care.
What things associated with a lower SES influence health?
More polluted environments
More violent environments
Less access to healthy food
Less access to safe outdoor spaces
More chaotic and unpredictable environments
High levels of interpersonal conflict (leads to stress)
Major life disruptions are more likely (leads to stress)
What is considered to be a healthy diet?
Eating mostly plants, natural food that isn’t processed and not eating too much.
What is the metabolic syndrome?
A collection of risk factors including high blood sugar, insulin resistance, high blood levels of cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.
What are some of the benefits associated with excercise?
Better physical and mental health
Builds self-confidence
Helps coping with stress
Enhances the growth of new neurons
Enhances the production of synaptic connections
Promotes recovery from heart attacks
Reduces cognitive decline
What is stress?
A type of response that typically involves an unpleasant state, like anxiety or tension. It is a subjective experience
What are the three types of stressors?
Major life stressors (change or disruption in a central part of one's life), chronic stress (set of ongoing challenges often linked to illness, poverty or caregiving), daily hassles.
What is the chronic stress experienced by members of marginalised communities called?
Discrimination stress
What are the effects of cortisol on the body?
It increases blood glucose levels
Prepares the body for injury
Saves energy by slowing processes like digestion down
Triggers a negative feedback, reducing the activity of the HPA
It affects the immune system
What effects can prolonged stress have on the body?
Causes brain regions with cortisol receptors to become less sensitive to the effects of cortisol over time.
It disrupts working and long-term memory.
Overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, leading to higher blood pressure, constriction of blood vessels, increased release of fatty acids into the bloodstream, greater buildup of plaque in arteries, ...
What are the stages of the general adaptation syndrome?
Alarm stage, resistance stage and exhaustion stage.
What is a fight-or-flight response?
It's the sympathetic nervous system’s response to a stressor, which enables the organism to direct all its energy to dealing with the threat by either fighting or fleeing.
What is the tend-and-befriend response?
The tendency to protect and care for offspring and form social alliances as the response to a stressor, rather than fight or flight.
Repeated chronic stressful events cause systems to be stuck in certain states and less responsive to the changing conditions. What is this wear and tear of the body due to stress called?
Allostatic load
How can we reduce the negative health effects of stress?
By coping, by using appraisals that link our feelings with our thoughts to deal with stressors.
What is the difference between primary and secondary appraisals?
Primary appraisals involve making decisions about whether a stimulus is stressful, benign or irrelevant. Secondary appraisals part of the coping process during which people evaluate their response options and choose coping behaviours.
In what way can we use thoughts to deal with stress?
Positive reappraisal
Downward comparisons
Creation of positive events
Reappraising one’s stress response as adaptive
What is the broaden-and-build theory?
It is a way to expand the view of what is possible in a situation (broaden) and develop new ideas and relationships (build) to help us cope.
What is the buffering hypothesis?
It states that when others provide emotional support, the recipient is better at coping with stressful situations.
What are attitudes?
Our evaluations of other people, objects, events, and ideas which help make the evaluations of these things faster and easier.
What do we base our attitudes on?
Direct experience, cognitive processes (rational thinking) and emotional associations (from conditioning or the mere exposure effect)
What is the mere exposure effect?
It is an effect that says we like things more by simply seeing them more often.
Do we develop negative attitudes faster than positive ones? Why?
Yes, because it is adaptive to have a higher sensitivity to danger
How can we measure implicit attitudes?
We use an implicit association test (IAT) because people are not conciously aware of implicit attitudes.
What is the implicit association test (IAT) best used for?
As a group measure, to find out implicit biases in an area and it is best used together with other measures and not on its own.
Is suppressing a good way to avoid sterotypes?
Not really, it's very hard to actively try not to think about something, you often end up thinking about it more.
What are some ways to avoid stereotyping?
Supressing the thought (not very effective), avoiding reliance on stereotypes when they are activated or avoiding stereotype activation altogether (very hard to do in practice).
What is the link between attitudes and behaviour?
The stonger the attitude the better it is at predicting behaviour.
The more accessible the attitude is, the more likely it will predict behaviour.
The more specific the attitude the more it predicts behaviour.
Depending on the domain of the attitude it will predict behaviour better or worse. (Eg: political party is more likely to predict voting patterns than blood donation will predict donating behaviours)
What is conformity?
Th tendency to conform to the majority.
We sometimes look at others to find what the right answer is, especially in abiguous situations. What type of influence is this?
Informational influence
When we copy other people's behaviour to fit in, what kind of influence is this?
Normative influence
What are some factors that influence conformity?
Group size and lack of consensus.
What are some factors that influence obedience?
Gradual increments of commitment lead to higher obedience
Being close to the victim decrease obedience
The closeness of the authority figure (higher obidience if the authority figure is present rather than talking to you over the phone)
Legitimacy of the authority figure determines obedience (the more prestigious the more obedience)
What do we call it when the presence of others increases our performance?
Social facilitation
What do we call it when performance decreases in a group setting?
Social inhibition
What is the dominant response?
The response that is most likely to be performed in a situation. These are behaviours that have consistently been useful and they become a habit that is then the dominant response produced by arousal.
Why can a group setting both facilitate and inhibit performance?
The presence of others increases arousal, which facilitates the dominant response, this improves performance in simple and routine tasks but decreases performance in complex and novel tasks.
What effects explain why people work less hard in groups?
Social loafing = individual contribution not being identifiable
Dispensability effect = individual contribution will have little impact on group performance
Sucker effect = avoid being exploited
What effects explain why people work harder in groups?
Social competition = group member try to outperform each other (individual contributions must be identifiable)
Social compensation = strong group members increase effort to make up for weaker members
Köhler effect = weaker members increase effort to avoid the responsibility of a weak group project.
When people are in crowds they are not self-aware and they do things they would not do if they were alone, they lose the sense of being a moral actor. Why does this happen?
Because of deindividuation. The anonimity of the mass reduces self-awareness, leading to anti-normative behaviour.
does deindividuation always produce negative effects?
No, it results in stronger adherence to group norms, these can be positive or negative.
What are the main factors that contribute to the formation of a relationship?
Proximity, familiarity, physical attractiveness
Why does physical attractiveness tend to be a factor in the formation of relationships?
We associate good looks with good personality, life satisfaction and competence
What are the most important factors in. order to maintain a relationship?
Similarity and reciprocity
How do romantic relationships affect our self-concept?
Our self concepts expand so that traits we associate with our partner become a part of us
What is stereotype threat?
The concern or fear people experience if they believe their performance on a task could confirm a negative stereotype about theur group.
What do we mean when we say something is maladaptive?
A behaviour that interferes with a person’s ability to respond appropriately in certain situations.
What is the categorical approach to diagnosing people?
When we diagnose people by putting a label on a cluster of symptoms. It implies that people either have or do not have a psychological disorder.
What is the dimensional approach to diagnonsing people?
When we considers psychological disorders along a continuum on which people vary in degree rather than in kind. This recognises that many psychological disorders are extreme versions of normal feelings.
What is the research domain criteia (RDoC)?
A method that defines the basic domains of functioning and considers them across multiple levels of analysis. It guides research on the underlying biological and psychological causes of disorders
What do we call it when psychological disorders tend to overlap or occur together?
Comorbidity
What contitutes an assessment for a disorder?
An examination of a person’s mental functions and psychological condition to diagnose a psychological disorder.
A disorder may develop when an underlying vulnerability is coupled with a precipitating event, such as stress. What model proposese this?
The diathesis-stress model.
Are there differences in brain anatomy between people with psychological disorders and those without?
Yes, brain regions may function differently
What does the family systems model state?
An individual’s behaviour must be considered within a social context, particularly within the family.
What does the sociocultural model state?
It views psychopathology as a result of the interaction between individuals and their cultures.
What is an example of a bias in the willingness to diagnose certain disorders to different social classes?
Eccentric behaviour among the wealthy and elite might be tolerated or viewed as amusing, but the same behaviour in lower social classes is taken as disordered
What are the differences between internalising and externalising disorders?
Internalising disorders are characterised by negative emtions of fear or distress and they are more common in women.
Externalising disorders are characterised by impulsive or out-of-control behaviours and are more common in men.
When are psychological disorders more similar across cultures?
When they have a strong biological component
What are the main disorders that cause disturbances in emotion?
Anxiety disorders, phobias, depressive disorders, bipolar disorder
What are some of the disorders characterised by maladaptive behaviour?
Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, addiction
What is the difference between generalised anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder?
In generalised anxiety disorder the anxiety is not focused so the person is constantly alert, while in social anxiety disorder there is a specific fear of being negatively evaluated by others.
What is a phobia?
An exaggerated and out of proportion fear of a specific object or situation.
What are the main difference between major depressive disorder and persistent depressive disorder?
For a major depressive disorder the severity is greater but more short lived, and for persistent depressive disorder the symptoms are less intense but long lasting.
True or false: Men are more likely to experience depressive disorders.
False
What are some of the cognitive processes that play a role in depression?
Negative thoughts about oneself, the world around one and the future. Attributing misfortunes to personal defects while seeing positive occurrences as a result of luck. Seeing themselves as unable to have any effect on their lives
What is learned helplessness in depression?
seeing themselves as unable to have any effect on their lives
What characterises bipolar I disorder?
Manic episodes are characterisitc, there is not necessarily any major depressive episodes. The impairment in daily living comes from the manic episodes.
What characterises bipolar II disorder?
Experiencing less extreme mood elevation (hypomania) but at least one major depressive episode.
What is the importance of family history in bipolar disorders?
Family history is the strongest predictor for bipolar disorders and successive generations tend to have more severe disorders.
What are the main characteristic of schizophrenia?
Alterations in thoughts, perceptions and consciousness and psychosis (disconnection from reality).
What are positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia and what are some examples?
Positive symptoms are features that are present in schizophrenia but not in typical behaviour, such as delusions or hallucinations. Negative symptoms are characteristics that are missing in schizophrenia that are typically part of daily functioning, such as apathy or slowed speech and movement.
What symptoms of schizophrenia do antipsychotics reduce?
Positive symptoms
Can schizophrenia be diagnosed in childhood?
No, but there are some traits that predict the development of schizophrenia later in life. Usually obvious symptoms of schizophrenia appear in late adolescence.
What is the difference between obsessions and compulsions in OCD?
Obsessions are recurrent, intrusive and unwanted thoughts, ideas or mental images that increase anxiety, while compulsions are acts that people with OCD feel driven to perform repeatedly to reduce anxiety.
What is a possible cause of OCD?
It could result from classical conditioning, where anxiety is paired with a specific event and the person engages in behaviour to reduce anxiety, which is reinforced by operant conditioning.
What are the main differences betwen anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder?
Binge eating only happens in people with bulimia and binge-eating disorder, but only people with bulimia will purge. People with anorexia nervosa have an excessive fear of becoming fat resulting in severe restriction on how much they eat.
How are eating disorder influenced by culture?
Bulimia does not occur in all cultures and anorexia only occurs in societies with abundant food.
What is tolerance?
This is when a person needs to take more of a particular substance to achieve the same subjective effect.
What symptoms do people going through withdrawl experience?
A psychological and physiological state of anxiety, tension and craving for the substance. Physical symptoms often include nausea, chills, body aches and tremors.
What role does the insula play in addiction?
The insula plays an important role in the craving component of addiction.
What causes the loss of euphoria when when we become more tolerant to a drug?
It comes from the brain reward system becoming less sensitive
What are some of the genetic components of addiction?
The same level of use leads to addiction for some but not for others, adolescents high in sensation seeking are more likely to develop addictions, inherited risk factors such as risk-taking and impulsivity make someone more prone to addiction.
What is trauma?
A prolonged psychological and physiological response to a distressing event, often one that profoundly violates the person’s beliefs about the world.
What are some of the main symptoms of PTSD?
Nightmares, intrusive memories and flashbacks. Chronic anxiety, tension and health problems. The memory problem of not being able to forget something. Tend to be hypervigilant to stimuli associated with their traumatic event.
What are dissociative disorders?
Disorders that involve disruptions of identity, memory or conscious awareness. Thought to be a functional response to an extremely distressing traumatic event, by cutting off the event from the rest of the person’s life and identity.
What type of trauma is borderline personality disorder often associated with?
Interpersonal trauma in childhood, leading to an intense fear of abandonment.
Personality disorders are divided into clusters A, B and C. What characterises each of these clusters?
Cluster A = odd or eccentric behaviour.
Cluster B =dramatic, emotional or erratic behaviours.
Cluster C = anxious or fearful behaviour.
What are some of the controversies with personality disorders?
They are just extreme versions of normal personality traits.
People diagnosed with personality disorders often meet criteria for another trauma-related disorder.
Diagnosis of personality disorders are highly stigmatising.
How are psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder related?
Psychopathy is an extreme version of antisocial personality disorder that includes the willingness to hurt others for personal gain.
What are the characteristics of autism spectrum disorder?
Impaired communication, restricted interests and deficits in social interaction.
What is echolalia?
An odd speaking pattern where there is a repetition of words or phrases that someone else has spoken.
Could autism and schizophrenia share several gene mutations?
Yes, these disorders may related because they involve similar deficits in core psychological domains
What are some of the common symptoms of ADHD?
Hyperactivity, restlessness, inattentiveness and impulsiveness. People with ADHD have a proneness to accidents
ADHD is related to a reduced volume and metabolism in what brain regions?
In brain regions involving attention, cognitive and motor control, emotional regulation and motivation.