Schizophrenic Disorders

• Schizophrenic Disorders: about 1 in every 100 person are diagnosed with schizophrenia.
• Disorganized thinking: the thinking of a person with schizophrenia is fragmented and bizarre and distorted with false beliefs.
• Delusion (false beliefs): Delusions of persecution, delusion of grandeur.
• Disturbed Perceptions: sensory experiences without sensory stimulations.
• Inappropriate Emotions and Actions: laugh at inappropriate times, flat effect-a reduction in emotion, senseless, compulsive acts, catatonia-motionless waxy flexibility.
• Positive vs. Negative Symptoms: 
• Positive: Presence of inappropriate symptoms.
• Negative: Absence of appropriate ones.
• Types of Schizophrenia:
• Disorganized Schizophrenia: disorganized speech or behavior, or flat or inappropriate emotions.
• Paranoid Schizophrenia: preoccupied with deletions or hallucinations.
• Catatonic Schizophrenia: parrot like repeating of another's speech and movements.
• Undifferentiated Schizophrenia: many and varied symptoms.

Mood and Personality Disorders

• Mood Disorders: experience extreme or inappropriate emotions.
• Major Depression: unhappy for at least two weeks with no apparent cause. Depression is the common cold of psychological disorder.
• Dysthymic Disorder: suffering from mild depression during the winter months. Based not on temperature, but on amount of sunlight.
• Bipolar Disorder: formally manic depression. Involves periods of depression and manic episodes. Manic episodes involve feelings of high energy.
• Personality Disorders: well-established maladaptive ways of behaving that negatively affect people's ability to function. Dominates their personality.
• Antisocial Personality Disorder: rely too much on the attention and help of others.
• Histrionic Personality Disorder: needs to be the center of attention.
• Narcissistic Personality Disorder: having an unwarranted sense of self-importance. Thinking that you are the center of the universe.

Somatoform and Dissociative Disorders

• Somatoform Disorder: occurs when a person manifests a psychological problem through a psychological symptom.
• Hypochondriasis: has frequent physical complaints for which medical doctors are unable to locate the cause.
• Conversion Disorder: report the existence of severe physical problems with no biological reasons. Blindness or paralysis.
• Dissociative Disorders: involves a disruption in the conscious process.
• Psychogenic Amnesia: a person cannot remember things with no physiological basis for the disruption in memory.
• Dissociative Fugue: people with psychogenic amnesia find themselves in an unfamiliar place.
• Dissociative Identity Disorder: used to be known as Multiple Personality Disorder. A person has several rather than one integrated personality. People with DID commonly have a history of childhood abuse or trauma.

Anxiety Disorder

• Abnormal Psychology: a "harmful dysfunction" in which behavior is judged to be atypical, disturbing, maladaptive and unjustifiable.
• Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the big book of disorders. DSM will classify disorders and describe the symptoms. DSM will NOT explain what causes or possible cures.
• Two Major Classification in the DSM
• Neurotic Disorders: distressing but one can still function in society and act rationally.
• Psychotic Disorders: person loses contact with reality, experiences distorted perceptions.
• Anxiety Disorders: a group of conditions where the primary symptoms are anxiety or defenses against anxiety.
• Phobias: a person experiences sudden episodes of intense dread.
• Generalization Anxiety Disorder (GAD): a person is continuously tense, apprehensive and in a state of autonomic nervous system arousal.
• Panic Disorder: an anxiety disorder marked by a minute-long episode of intense dread in which a person experiences terror and chest pain, choking and other frightening sensation.
• Obsessive-compulsive Disorder: persistent unwanted thoughts (obsessions) cause someone to feel he need (compulsion) to engage in a particular action.
• Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): flashbacks or nightmares following a person's involvement in or observation of an extremely stressful event.

Psychology notes

• Psychology: the science of behavior and mental processes.
• Goals of Psychology:
• Observe
• Predict
• Explain
• Describe
• Control
• Wilhelm Wundt: Father of psychology
• Structuralism
• Broke down mental processes into the most basic components (structures) of conscious experience.
• What did you see? Hear? Taste? Smell? Feel? (Introspection)
• Functionalism
• Focused less on the how of sensation and perception, but rather on the why.
• Psychology Perspective
• Neuroscience Perspective: focus on how the physical body and brain creates out emotions, memories, and sensory experience.
• Evolutionary Perspective: we behave the way we do because we inherited those behavior.
• Psychodynamic Perspective: out behavior comes from unconscious drives.
• Behavioral Perspective: only cares about the behaviors that impair out living and attempts to change them.
• Cognitive Perspective: focuses on positive growth. Attempt to seek self-actualization.