Psych 316 Exam 3

• Psychosis


  A loss of contact with reality
• Schizophrenia


  A mental disorder characterized by three categories of symptoms: positive, negative, and psychomotor
• Symptoms of schizophrenia


  • Positive: excesses of thought, emotion, and behavior
  • Negative: deficits of thought, emotion, and behavior
  • Psychomotor: unusual movements or gestures
• Delusions


  False beliefs despite evidence to the contrary
• Types of delusions


  • Persecution: believes a person or group intends to harm them
  • Reference: believes everyday events have a huge bearing on them
  • Erotomanic: believes someone is secretly in love with them
  • Somatic: believes their internal or external bodily functions are abnormal
  • Grandeur: has an overinflated sense of worth, power, knowledge, identity, or relationship with someone famous
  • Control: believes another person, group, or external force controls their thoughts, feelings, impulses, or behaviors
• Formal thought disorder


  Disturbance in the production and organization of thoughts
• Examples of formal thought disorders


  • Loose associations: can't stay on track of a thought or conversation
  • Neologism: making up words
  • Perseveration: repetition of words
  • Clang: rhyming words
• Hallucination


  False sensory perception without external stimuli
• Inappropriate affect


  Displays of emotion that are unsuited or inappropriate for the situation
• Types of catatonia


  • Catatonic stupor: inability to move, speak, or respond to a stimuli
  • Catatonic rigidity: stiff and inflexible movements (muscle cramping)
  • Catatonic excitement: excessive motor activity, restlessness, or agitation
  • Catatonic posturing: unusual and fixed body positions
• Phases of schizophrenia


  • Prodromal: initial phase, symptoms begin to emerge slowly
  • Active: diagnosis usually occurs in this stage, experience more impairing symptoms
  • Residual: severeness of symptoms decrease, characterized by a lower level of functioning than pre-illness
• Type I schizophrenia


  Dominated by positive symptoms, and is more treatable with a higher prevalence
• Type II schizophrenia


  Dominated by negative symptoms
• Biological factors associated with schizophrenia


  • Dopamine neurotransmitters
• Viral infection during pregnancy could be passed onto the fetus and impact brain development, increasing the chance for the child to develop schizophrenia
• The "schizophrenogenic mother" theory, which suggests that cold, domineering, and uninterested mothers cause schizophrenia, is not empirically supported
• Cognitive explanation of schizophrenia


  • Operant conditioning: attention to social cues was not reinforced during childhood, so focus shifts to irrelevant cues
  • Misinterpreting unusual events
• Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than non-Hispanic white Americans, and there is a 4x higher prevalence among immigrant populations
• Diathesis-stress relationship in schizophrenia


  • Higher genetic prevalence = less stressors needed
  • No genetic prevalence = no matter how many stressors, schizophrenia will not develop
• There is usually more negative expressed emotion in schizophrenia cases within the family
• Milieu therapy


  Trying to provide a therapeutic environment for people to heal and engage in typical social events
• Token economy program


  Reinforce positive activities by giving tokens, which can be traded in for something
• Tardive dyskinesia


  Involuntary/repetitive movements of the body with first generation antipsychotics
• First generation antipsychotics


  Target only dopamine receptors, developed first
• Second generation antipsychotics


  Target dopamine, serotonin, and other neurotransmitters, developed more recently
• Cognitive remediation


  Focuses on cognitive impairments, namely attention, planning, and memory; use the computer to complete information processing tasks; helps with social awareness and planning, social relationships, and daily living
• Hallucination reinterpretation and acceptance


  Challenges inaccurate ideas about hallucinations, reattribute and accurately interpret hallucinations; helps to feel in control and improve delusional ideas
• Community approach


  Patients receive mental health services in communities rather than institutions, previously focused on institutionalization but has moved to more outpatient care
• Assertive community treatment


  Trying to implement care earlier
• Primary issues with community care


  • Not enough case workers
  • Not enough funding
• Personality


  Unique expressed characteristics that influence our behaviors, emotions, thoughts, and interactions
• Personality disorder


  Enduring rigid patterns of inner experience and outward behavior that repeatedly impairs a person's sense of self, emotional experiences, goals, capacity for empathy, and/or capacity for intimacy
• Categorical approach


  Yes or no fitting into disorder
• Dimensional approach


  More of a construct
• Categories of personality disorders


  • Odd: paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal
  • Dramatic: antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic
  • Anxious: avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive
• Paranoid personality disorder


  Deep distrust and suspiciousness, isolated, cold, and distant, critical of others but sensitive to feedback, inaccurate and inappropriate beliefs
• Schizoid personality disorder


  Avoidance of social relationships due to preference of being alone, limited emotional expression and often viewed as cold, humorless, or dull, focus mainly on themselves and are unaffected by others' opinions
• Schizotypal personality disorder


  Discomfort in close relationships, isolate themselves due to anxiety but often lonely, odd patterns of thinking, behavioral eccentricities, inappropriate, flat, or humorless emotions, difficulty focusing attention
• Schizotypal personality disorder differs from schizophrenia in that it does not involve psychosis
• Disorders within the "dramatic" personality disorders


  • Antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic