psych

• Abnormality is defined in terms of how common something is or how often a behaviour is observed.
• Anything that is uncommon or not seen often in society can be deemed abnormal.
• This is a mathematical method and uses statistics such as the mean, median and mode to define what is typical, and this can be applied to behaviour.
• The definition of abnormality uses the idea that human attributes/behaviour fall into a normal distribution.
• A normal distribution has a central average, or mean, and the rest of the population fall symmetrically above and below that mean.
• Standard deviation as a measure informs us how far scores fall on either side away from the mean.