Psychopathology

Psychopathology

Definitions of abnormality:

• Deviation from social norms.
• Failure to function adequately.
• Statistical infrequency.
• Deviation from ideal mental health.

Phobias:

• Behavioural - phobic stimulus is avoided or faced with anxiety. Avoidance can give negative reinforcement which will maintain the phobia. This could interfere with daily routine.
• Emotional - exposure to the phobic stimulus nearly always produces a rapid anxiety response.
• Cognitive -  A person would recognise that the fear is excessive or unreasonable. The person is consciously aware that the anxiety levels they experience in relation to their feared object or situation are overstated.

Depression:

• Behavioural - neglect of personal appearance, loss of appetite, disturbed sleep patterns, loss of energy, withdrawal from others.
• Emotional - intense sadness, irritability, apathy, feelings of worthlessness, anger.
• Cognitive - negative thoughts, lack of concentration, low self-esteem, poor memory, recurrent thoughts of death, low confidence.

OCD:

• Behavioural - compulsions are the repetative behavioural responses intended to neutralise obsessions, often involving rigidly applied rules. Most OCD sufferers recognise their compulsions as unreasonable but believe something bad will happen if they don't perform the behaviour.
• Emotional - anxiety, worry, distress,
• Cognitive - obsessions dominate thinking and are persistant and recurrent thoughts, images or beliefs entering the mind uninvited and can't be removed. At some point the person recognsies the obsessions and compulsions as excessive or unreasonable.

Behavioural approach to explaining phobias:

• The two-process model says that classical conditioning is behind the development of phobias while operant condtioning is behind maintaining them.
• Classical conditioning - the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) has an uncondtioned response (UCR) of anxiety. The neutral stimulus (NS) causes the UCS which casues the UCR. The NS becomes the conditioned stimulus (CS) which is the phobic stimulus and has a condtioned response (CR) of anxiety.
• Operant conditioning - The CS evokes the CR of anxiety. Avoidance of the phobic stimulus lessens the feeling which is rewarding. This negative reinfrocement strrengthens the avoidance behaviour and the phobia is maintained.
• Little Albert (1920) - Albert developed a phobia of a white rat when he associated it with a loud noise. The behaviourist approach is limited as it overlooks the role of cognition which is problematic as irrational thinking is a key feature of phobias. Most adults have experienced, witnessed or heard about car accidents yet they don't fear cars. Seligman (1970) suggested humans have biological preparedness to develop certain phobias rather than others because they were adaptive in our evolutionary past. The cognitive approach critices the behaviourist explanation as it doesn't take into account mental pprocesses. This experimetn also raied ethical concerns and couldn't be conducted today.

Behavioural approach to treating phobias:

• Systematic desensitisation - patients is taught a deep muscle relaxation technique and breathing exercises. Then the patient creates a fear hierarchy starting at the stimuli that causes the least anxiety to the most anxiety. The patients works their way up the hieracrchy using the relaxation technique as they go. When they feel comfortable with the stage they move on to the next. Usually need 4-6 sessions…