Psychology Test - 7

Key Words:

• Disorder: An illness that disrupts normal physical or mental functions. A disorder could be defined as a set of problems, which result in causing significant difficulty, distress, impairment, and/or suffering in a person's daily life. A disorder is a problem or illness which affects someone's mind or body.
• Dissociation: Disconnection and lack of continuity between thoughts, memories, surroundings, actions, and identity. Dissociation is a mental process of disconnecting from one's thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity.  Dissociation is a disconnection between a person's memories, feelings, behaviors, perceptions, and/or sense of self.
• Convulsion: It is the sudden violent movement of the body that cannot be controlled.  A convulsion occurs when a person's muscles contract uncontrollably. A convulsion is an episode in which we experience rigidity and uncontrolled muscle spasms along with altered consciousness.
• Conversion: It is the act or process of changing from one form, system, or use to another

Conclusion: Disorder is a lack of order — in other words, chaos, clutter, and general disarray, while dissociation is a disconnection between a person's sensory experience, thoughts, sense of self, or personal history. Convulsion is a sudden violent movement of the body that cannot be controlled while conversion is the process of converting something from one thing to another. So, from the above discussion, it can be concluded that lack of mental synthesis, integration, and adjustment is otherwise called dissociation. Hence, option (2) is correct.

Disorder refers to a state which affects an individual's mood, feeling, thinking, and behaviour. It results in constant behaviour patterns that affect the function of normal life and the elimination of purposeful functioning of cognition and emotions.

Abnormal forgetting caused by mental and physical trauma is called amnesia as it is a disorder in which:

• one can't remember an event due to a brain injury.
• one can't form new memories due to trauma or stress.
• one can't recall old memories due to the ill-effect of alcohol.
• one can't recognise familiar faces due to traumatic events.

Hence, it could be concluded that abnormal forgetting caused by mental trauma and physical trauma is called amnesia.

Additional Information

Autism or autistic disorder or childhood autism, or Kanner’s autism is described as one of the most common and most puzzling and disabling pervasive developmental disorders. It is a developmental disorder that involves a range of behaviours including language deficits, perceptual and motor development; defective reality testing; and an inability to function in social situations. 

Key Points

• Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavioural challenges.
• It can cause significant social, communication and behavioural challenges. There is often nothing about how people with ASD look that sets them apart from other people, but people with ASD may communicate, interact, behave, and learn in ways that are different from most other people.
• The learning, thinking, and problem-solving abilities of people with ASD can range from gifted to severely challenged. Some people with ASD need a lot of help in their daily lives; others need less.

It can be concluded that full form of ASD is Autism spectrum disorder.

 A psychological disorder is a designation often used interchangeably with the terms mental disorder, psychiatric disorder, or mental illness. It is a syndrome characterized by​ a clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognitive, emotional regulation, or behaviour that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental process underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities.

MAJOR PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS:

1. Anxiety Disorders
2. Somatoform Disorders
3. Dissociative Disorders
4. Mood Disorders
5. Schizophrenic Disorders: Delusions, disorganized thinking and speech, heightened perception and hallucinations, and inappropriate effect are the ones most often symptoms found in schizophrenia.

Hallucination: 

• Schizophrenics may have hallucinations, i.e. perceptions that occur in the absence of external stimuli.
• Types of hallucinations:
  1. Auditory hallucinations: Patients hear sounds or voices that speak words, phrases, and sentences directly to the patient (second person hallucination) or talk to one another referring to the patient as s/he (third-person hallucination).
  2. Tactile hallucinations (i.e. forms of tingling, burning),
  3. Somatic hallucinations (i.e. something happening inside the body such as a snake crawling inside one’s stomach),
  4. visual hallucinations (i.e. vague perceptions of color or distinct visions of people or objects),
  5. gustatory hallucinations (i.e. food or drink taste strange), and
  6. olfactory hallucinations (i.e. smell of poison or smoke)

Delusion:

• A delusion is a false belief that is firmly held on inadequate grounds.
• It is not affected by rational argument and has no basis in reality.
• Delusions of persecution are the most common in schizophrenia. People with this delusion believe that they are being plotted against, spied on, slandered, threatened, attacked, or deliberately victimized.
• People with schizophrenia may also experience delusions of reference in which they attach special and personal meaning to the actions of others or to objects and events.
• In delusions of grandeur, people believe themselves to be specially empowered persons and in delusions of control, they believe that their feelings, thoughts, and actions are controlled by others.

Hence, A sensory experience in the absence of stimulation of receptors is called hallucination.

Additional Information

Paranoia:

• An unrealistic distrust of others or a feeling of being persecuted. Extreme degrees may be a sign of mental illness.
• Paranoia is the feeling that you're being threatened in some way, such as people watching you or acting against you, even though there's no proof that it's true.
• It happens to a lot of people at some point. Even when you know that your concerns aren't based in reality, they can be troubling if they happen too often.

Illusions: 

• Our perceptions are not always veridical. Sometimes we fail to interpret the sensory information correctly. This results in a mismatch between the physical stimuli and its perception. These misperceptions resulting from misinterpretation of information received by our sensory organs are generally known as illusions.
• These are experienced more or less by all of us.
• They result from an external stimulus situation and generate the same kind of experience in each individual. That is why illusions are also called “primitive organisations”.
• Although illusions can be experienced by the stimulation of any of our senses, psychologists have studied them more commonly in the visual than in other sense modalities.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder(ADHD) is a brain disorder that affects how you pay attention, sit, still, and control your behaviour. It happens in children and teens and can continue into adulthood. Children with ADHD may have trouble paying attention and controlling impulsive behaviours. ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed mental disorder in children.

Key Points

• The three main symptoms of ADHD include the following:
  • ​Inattention: Short attention span for age (difficulty sustaining attention) Difficulty listening to others.
  • Impulsivity: Has difficulty waiting for his or her turn in school and/or social games, Takes frequent risks, and often without thinking before acting.
  • Hyperactivity: Has difficulty remaining in his/her seat even when it is expected, Fidgets with hands or squirms when in his or her seat; fidgets excessively.
• So Impulsivity, low attention span, fidgeting, and inability to sit for long are primary characteristics of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
  • ​That's why option (3) is the correct answer.​

​​Additional Information

•  ADHD can't be prevented or cured. But spotting it early, plus having a good treatment and education plan, can help a child or adult with ADHD manage their symptoms.
•  Medication, education, skills training, and psychological counselling can also help a student to reduce ADHD.

Psychological disorders: Most definitions of abnormality have certain common features, often called the ‘four Ds’: deviance, distress, dysfunction, and danger. That is, psychological disorders are deviant (different, extreme, unusual, even bizarre), distressing (unpleasant and upsetting to the person and to others), dysfunctional (interfering with the person’s ability to carry out daily activities in a constructive way), and possibly dangerous (to the person or to others). 

Psychological Disorders are:

Panic Disorder: 

• It is a type of anxiety disorder, which consists of recurrent anxiety attacks in which the person experiences intense terror.
• A panic attack denotes an abrupt surge of intense anxiety rising to a peak when thoughts of particular stimuli are present. Such thoughts occur in an unpredictable manner.
• The clinical features include shortness of breath, dizziness, trembling, palpitations, choking, nausea, chest pain or discomfort, fear of going crazy, losing control or dying

Mood Disorder:

• Mood disorders are characterised by disturbances in mood or prolonged emotional state.
• The most common mood disorder is depression, which covers a variety of negative moods and behavioural changes. Depression can refer to a symptom or a disorder.
• In day-to-day life, we often use the term depression to refer to normal feelings after a significant loss, such as the break-up of a relationship, or the failure to attain a significant goal.
• The main types of mood disorders include
  1. depressive disorder:
     • ​​A major depressive disorder is defined as a period of depressed mood and/or loss of interest or pleasure in most activities, together with other symptoms which may include a change in body weight, constant sleep problems, tiredness, inability to think clearly, agitation, greatly slowed behaviour, and thoughts of death and suicide.
     • Other symptoms include excessive guilt or feelings of worthlessness.
  2. mania: 
     • ​​People suffering from mania become euphoric (‘high’), extremely active, excessively talkative, and easily distractible.
     • Manic episodes rarely appear by themselves; they usually alternate with depression. 
  3. bipolar mood disorder:
     • ​​A mood disorder, in which both mania and depression are alternately present, is sometimes interrupted by periods of normal mood. This is known as bipolar mood disorder.
     • Bipolar mood disorders were earlier referred to as manic-depressive disorders.
     • Among the mood disorders, the lifetime risk of a suicide attempt is highest in the case of bipolar mood disorders.
     • Several risk factors in addition to the mental health status of a person predict the likelihood of suicide. These include age, gender, ethnicity, or race and recent occurrence of serious life events.

Conversion Disorder:

• The person suffers from a loss or impairment of motor or sensory function (e.g., paralysis, blindness, etc.) that has no physical cause but maybe a response to stress and psychological problems. 
• The symptoms of conversion disorders are the reported loss of part or all of some basic body functions.
• Paralysis, blindness, deafness and difficulty in walking are generally among the symptoms reported.

Dissociative Disorder:

• Dissociation can be viewed as a severance of the connections between ideas and emotions.
• Dissociation involves feelings of unreality, estrangement, depersonalisation, and sometimes a loss or shift of identity.
• Sudden temporary alterations of consciousness that blot out painful experiences are a defining characteristic of dissociative disorders.
• Four conditions are included in this group: dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, dissociative identity disorder, and depersonalisation.

Hence, An individual having sudden and temporary fluctuation of consciousness that blots out painful experience is showing signs of dissociative disorder.

Eating disorder: It is a mental disorder in which there are disturbances when it comes to eating behavior, which leads to some sort of illness physically. It is categorized into three categories.

• Anorexia Nervosa: It is characterized by the perception in people find themselves overweight. The following are its characteristics and symptoms:
  • People usually eat too less and exercise too much.
  • This disorder is generally found in girls during adolescence.
  • People often check their weight, and find themselves overweight even if they are underweight.
  • Many die out of starvation, while there are cases in which it is found that some die due to suicide.
• Bulimia Nervosa: In this, people generally consume a large amount of food in a single attempt and it happens frequently. To offset this, people vomit, observe fast, and do excessive exercise.
• Binge Eating: It is similar to Bulimia Nervosa in the way that excessive eating takes place, however, there is no scope of compensation to digest the food. As a result, the person suffers from obesity or is overweight.

Hence, we conclude that the above-mentioned eating disorder in adolescence is known as Anorexia Nervosa.

Additional Information

• Developmental disorder: It refers to the severe, chronic disability of an individual that is likely to continue indefinitely. It affects the function of normal life and eliminations of purposeful functioning of cognition and emotions.

• Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis: It is a kind of disorder in which individuals feel compelled to perform uncontrollable repetitive behaviours. In this disorder, individuals originate repeated thoughts that lead to compulsive behaviour.

Hallucination is a false perception that has a compulsive sense of the reality of objects although relevant and adequate stimuli for such perception are lacking. It is an abnormal phenomenon.

Types of hallucinations:

1. Auditory hallucinations: Patients hear sounds or voices that speak words, phrases, and sentences directly to the patient (second-person hallucination) or talk to one another referring to the patient as s/he (third-person hallucination).
2. Tactile hallucinations (i.e. forms of tingling, burning),
3. Somatic hallucinations (i.e. something happening inside the body such as a snake crawling inside one’s stomach),
4. visual hallucinations (i.e. vague perceptions of color or distinct visions of people or objects),
5. gustatory hallucinations (i.e. food or drink taste strange), and
6. olfactory hallucinations (i.e. smell of poison or smoke)

1) Schizophrenia 

• It involves a range of problems with thinking (cognition), behavior, and emotions. 
• Signs and symptoms may vary, but usually involve delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech, and reflect an impaired ability to function. Schizophrenia is a psychosis, a type of mental illness characterized by distortions in thinking, perception, emotions, language, sense of self, and behaviour.

Common experiences include:

• hallucination: hearing, seeing, or feeling things that are not there;
• delusion: fixed false beliefs or suspicions not shared by others in the person’s culture and that are firmly held even when there is evidence to the contrary;
• abnormal behaviour: disorganized behaviour such as wandering aimlessly, mumbling or laughing to self (self-talk), strange appearance, self-neglect, or appearing unkempt;
• disorganized speech: incoherent or irrelevant speech; and/or
• disturbances of emotions: marked apathy or disconnect between reported emotion and what is observed such as a facial expression or body language.

2) Paranoia:

• An unrealistic distrust of others or a feeling of being persecuted. Extreme degrees may be a sign of mental illness.
• Paranoia is the feeling that you're being threatened in some way, such as people watching you or acting against you, even though there's no proof that it's true.
• It happens to a lot of people at some point. Even when you know that your concerns aren't based in reality, they can be troubling if they happen too often.
• symptoms of paranoia include mistrust, hypervigilance, difficulty with forgiveness, defensive attitude in response to imagined criticism, preoccupation with hidden motives, fear of being deceived or taken advantage of, inability to relax, or are argumentative.

3) Myopia: 

• Nearsightedness (myopia) is a common vision condition in which you can see objects near to you clearly, but objects farther away are blurry.
• It occurs when the shape of your eye causes light rays to bend (refract) incorrectly, focusing images in front of your retina instead of on your retina.

​4) Hysteria:

• It is mental instability, fits of rage, and anxiety; things that can actually happen when you are suffering from an illness or trauma.
• In 1980, hysteria was removed from medical texts as a disorder unto itself, but it has remained present as a symptom of the disease brought on by specific trauma, both physical and mental.
• Its symptoms include anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, (paradoxically) 

Schizophrenia is the descriptive term for a group of psychotic disorders in which personal, social, and occupational functioning deteriorate as a result of disturbed thought processes, strange perceptions, unusual emotional states, and motor abnormalities. It is a debilitating disorder. The social and psychological costs of schizophrenia are tremendous, both to patients as well as to their families and society.

Symptoms of Schizophrenia

• The symptoms of schizophrenia can be grouped into three categories 
  1. positive symptoms (i.e. excesses of thought, emotion, and behaviour),
  2. negative symptoms (i.e. deficits of thought, emotion, and behaviour), and
  3. psychomotor symptoms.

1) Positive symptoms:

• These are ‘pathological excesses’ or ‘bizarre additions’ to a person’s behaviour.
• Delusions, disorganised thinking and speech, heightened perception and hallucinations, and inappropriate effects are the ones most often found in schizophrenia.
• Delusion:
  • A delusion is a false belief that is firmly held on inadequate grounds.
  • It is not affected by rational argument and has no basis in reality.
  • Delusions of persecution are the most common in schizophrenia.
  • People with this delusion believe that they are being plotted against, spied on, slandered, threatened, attacked or deliberately victimised. 
• Hallucinations:
  • perceptions that occur in the absence of external stimuli.
  • Auditory hallucinations are most common in schizophrenia. Patients hear sounds or voices that speak words, phrases and sentences directly to the patient (second-person hallucination) or talk to one another referring to the patient as s/he (third-person hallucination).
  • Hallucinations can also involve the other senses. These include:
    • tactile hallucinations (i.e. forms of tingling, and burning),
    • somatic hallucinations (i.e. something happening inside the body such as a snake crawling inside one’s stomach),
    • visual hallucinations (i.e. vague perceptions of colour or distinct visions of people or objects),
    • gustatory hallucinations (i.e. food or drink taste strange), and
    • olfactory hallucinations (i.e. smell of poison or smoke)

2) Negative symptoms: 

• These are ‘pathological deficits’ and include poverty of speech, blunted and flat affect, loss of volition, and social withdrawal. 
• People with schizophrenia show alogia or poverty of speech.
• Alogia:
  • alogia or poverty of speech, i.e. a reduction in speech and speech content.
  • Many people with schizophrenia show less anger, sadness, joy, and other feelings than most people do. Thus they have blunted affect.
  • Some show no emotions at all, a condition known as flat affect.
  • Also patients with schizophrenia experience avolition, or apathy and an inability to start or complete a course of action.
  • People with this disorder may withdraw socially and become totally focused on their own ideas and fantasies.

3) Psychomotor symptoms:

• People with schizophrenia also show psychomotor symptoms.
• They move less spontaneously or make odd grimaces and gestures.
• These symptoms may take extreme forms known as catatonia.
• ​Catatonia: 
  • People in a catatonic stupor remain motionless and silent for long stretches of time.
  • Some show catatonic rigidity, i.e. maintaining a rigid, upright posture for hours.
  • Others exhibit catatonic posturing, i.e. assuming awkward, bizarre positions for long periods of time. 

Hence, People with schizophrenia show psychomotor symptoms which take the extreme form called catatonia.

There are several psychological models that provide a psychological explanation of mental disorders. These models maintain that psychological and interpersonal factors have a significant role to play in abnormal behaviour. These factors include maternal deprivation (separation from the mother, or lack of warmth and stimulation during early years of life), faulty parent-child relationships (rejection, overprotection, over - permissiveness, faulty discipline, etc.), maladaptive family structures (inadequate or disturbed family), and severe stress.

The psychological models include the psychodynamic, behavioural, cognitive, and humanistic-existential models.

1) Psychodynamic model:

• Psychodynamic theorists believe that behaviour, whether normal or abnormal, is determined by psychological forces within the person of which s/he is not consciously aware.
• These internal forces are considered dynamic, i.e. they interact with one another and their interaction gives shape to behaviour, thoughts, and emotions.
• Abnormal symptoms are viewed as the result of conflicts between these forces.
• This model was first formulated by Freud who believed that three central forces shape personality — instinctual needs, drives, and impulses (id), rational thinking (ego), and moral standards (superego).
• Freud stated that abnormal behaviour is a symbolic expression of unconscious mental conflicts that can be generally traced to early childhood or infancy.

2) Behavioural model:

• This model states that both normal and abnormal behaviors are learned and psychological disorders are the result of learning maladaptive ways of behaving.
• The model concentrates on behaviors that are learned through conditioning and propose that what has been learned can be unlearned.
• Learning can take place by classical conditioning (temporal association in which two events repeatedly occur close together in time), operant conditioning (behaviour is followed by a reward), and social learning (learning by imitating others’ behaviour).  These three types of conditioning account for behaviour, whether adaptive or maladaptive.

3) Cognitive model: 

• This model states that abnormal functioning can result from cognitive problems.
• People may hold assumptions and attitudes about themselves that are irrational and inaccurate.
• People may also repeatedly think in illogical ways and make overgeneralizations, that is, they may draw broad, negative conclusions on the basis of a single insignificant event

4) Humanistic-existential model:

• It focuses on broader aspects of human existence.
• Humanists believe that human beings are born with a natural tendency to be friendly, cooperative, and constructive, and are driven to self-actualize, i.e. to fulfill this potential for goodness and growth.
• Existentialists believe that from birth we have total freedom to give meaning to our existence or to avoid that responsibility. Those who shirk from this responsibility would live empty, inauthentic, and dysfunction.

Hence, The psychological model that explains abnormal behavior in the light of learning maladaptive ways is Behavioural model.

Additional Information

Sociocultural model: 

• abnormal behaviour is best understood in light of the social and cultural forces that influence an individual. 
• As behaviour is shaped by societal forces, factors such as family structure and communication, social networks, societal conditions, and societal labels and roles become more important.