Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology
“Week 9 … Week 10”
Summaries
- Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 9 > Psych Report
- Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 9 > Lesson
- Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 10 > Psych Report
- Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 10 > Lesson
Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 9 > Psych Report
- The proper term when referring to a multiple personality is dissociative identity disorder, and it remains rather controversial.
- So let’s head back in time and uncover the truth.
- The human mind is somewhat one track in that if you’re feeling very sad one moment, you’re likely to continue feeling some level of sadness for awhile as it tapers off.
- When you’re feeling sad, we tend to have sad thoughts and focus on sad things.
- Those who suffer from this disorder have a single personality like the rest of us, but they generally are confused, have unpredictable mood swings, and experience delusions and hallucinations since they are unable to match up their thoughts and feelings into a cohesive whole.
- It’s very disruptive and disturbing, both for them and their families.
- So now you know the difference between schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.
- Saying someone is schizo or making light of the identity disorder is hurtful to all those families who deal with the pain on a daily basis.
- It’s important to remember what was stated earlier, that psychological disorders are more than just someone straying from the norm in terms of their behavior.
- These are very normal situations for someone to experience anxiety.
- For almost 7 million people in the United States, they are not able to identify the cause of the anxiety.
- Since they can identify it, it’s difficult for them to deal with it or avoid the cause of the anxiety.
- Making matters worse, it’s very common for depression to develop.
- This is a description of someone who is suffering from generalized anxiety disorder, one of the many disorders that falls into the classification of an anxiety disorder.
- Generalized anxiety disorder is just one of almost 300 disorders listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM for short.
- Since we only have a short amount of time, we’ll look at one more disorder and then briefly discuss one method of treatment.
- Major depressive disorder, which falls under the classification of a mood disorder, affects approximately 15 million people in the United States.
- The World Health Organization also states that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the global burden of disease.
- So what’s the difference between depression, a feeling that all of us experience at times, and a major depressive disorder? A major depressive disorder occurs when the signs of depression last two or more weeks and are not caused by drugs or a medical condition.
- Some of the symptoms include lethargy, feelings of worthlessness, and a loss of interest in friends and family, to name a few.
- So what does treatment look like for these disorders? While there are many types of therapeutic treatments you will learn about, we’ll take a brief look at one that I’m fond of, cognitive behavioral therapy.
- The premise of this type of therapy is that a person may have negative thoughts or self-defeating thinking, and it is because of these negative thoughts that their behaviors change.
- In these situations the therapist focuses on changing the negative thoughts in order to change the behavior.
- The therapist would try to help the student change or get rid of their negative thoughts, encouraging them to work harder so that they could do better.
- It’s the changing of the thoughts that improves one’s behavior.
- You’ll have plenty of time to keep learning about disorders and treatments throughout the rest of this week.
Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 9 > Lesson
- SPEAKER 1: Now let’s take a look at psychological disorders.
- First, it’s important to know what is considered a disorder.
- The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM for short, is what counseling professionals use to classify the various mental disorders by classifying into five axes.
- A generalized anxiety disorder is a psychological disorder diagnosed in situations in which a person has been excessively worrying about money, health, work, family life, or relationships for at least six months, even though he or she knows that the concerns are exaggerated, and when the anxiety causes significant distress and dysfunction.
- A few of the anxiety disorders that you may have heard of are panic attacks, PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD, which is obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even specific phobias, like arachnophobia, which is a fear of spiders, or zoophobia, a fear of small animals.
- Mood, or affective disorders, are psychological disorders in which the person’s mood negatively influences his or her physical, perceptual, social, and cognitive processes.
- Depression can range from a diagnosis of dysthymia, a condition characterized by mild depressive symptoms but lasts for at least two years, all the way to a major depressive disorder, which is characterized by persistent low feelings of self-worth and a loss of pleasure in normal activities.
- Schizophrenic disorders are characterized by disturbances in thought patterns, with an onset between the ages of 16 and 30 years old.
- All of the above, anxiety, mood, and schizophrenic disorders, are all part of the axis I category in the DSM. In axis II in the DSM, we have personality disorders.
- A personality disorder is a disorder characterized by inflexible patterns of thinking, feeling, or relating to others that cause problems in personal, social, and work situations.
- These are milder versions of the more severe axis I disorders.
- Disorders in this category are ones like obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, or antisocial personality disorder.
- Most likely you know someone with a personality disorder.
- Disassociative disorders are conditions that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, awareness, identity, or perception.
- This is now known as the disassociative identity disorder.
- A few sleep disorders that people experience are sleepwalking, insomnia, and nightmares.
- Somatoform form and factitious disorders are both related to physical pain.
- The difference between the two are that somatoform disorders have real physical symptoms, but no real cause.
- With factitious disorders, the physical symptoms are not real.
- Now let’s turn our attention to the treatment of psychological disorders.
- Cognitive behavioral therapy was developed by Aaron Beck, and is a structured approach to treatment that attempts to reduce psychological disorders through systematic procedures based on cognitive and behavioral principles.
- Psychological disorder will result if there is a chemical imbalance.
- This has been our look at the diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders.
Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 10 > Psych Report
- Suddenly, the first knocks you to the ground and attempts to wrestle away your wallet.
- All around you are people enjoying their own activities, strolling on the lawns, feeding ducks, playing catch.
- Now consider honestly, in which situation would you feel the most helpless and frightened? Most people would feel the most helpless in the first scenario, alone on a dark street with only one other person around.
- If they look around and no one else seems alarmed by what’s happening, then generally they will presume it isn’t something they should worry about either.
- People may even rationalize to themselves that it’s something innocuous like a prank.
- Darley and Latane discovered that even once it’s obvious the situation is an emergency, the fact that there are others around actually discourages individuals from helping.
- The theory goes that with more people around, there’s less pressure for an individual to feel obligated to act.
- First, those people who generally don’t go with the flow and are less sensitive to social acceptance will usually act.
- JEREMY DAILEY: Thanks for clarifying that for us, Doc, I feel safer already.
- It’s time for our mini lesson, we’d better get started.
- As I stated earlier, social psychology is a topic that impacts all of us, every day.
- In this week’s mini lesson, we’ll take a quick look at the three main areas of social psychology- social thinking, social influence, and social relations.
- One of the main aspects of social thinking is Fritz Heider’s attribution theory.
- His theory noted that people usually attribute other’s behavior either to their internal dispositions, basically their personality traits, or to their external circumstances, possibly something that has happened to them.
- It Is the tendency to observe someone’s behavior and underestimate the impact of the situation and to overestimate personality characteristics.
- Well, rather than dwell on my errors, let’s move on to social influence.
- Social influence is the change in behavior that one person causes in another, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
- It involves our conformity, our compliance, and our group behavior.
- There have been a number of interesting and revealing experiments to model the effects of social influence, especially in regards to group behavior, but we’ll save those for a later time.
- For now, know that our behavior is contagious and that we are natural mimics, which is called the chameleon effect.
- We may conform and change our behavior in thinking simply because we have a desire to gain approval or simply to avoid disapproval.
- All of these interactions lead us to our social relations.
- To dive deeper into the study of social relations is to consider all the different ways, both positive and negative, that people relate to each other.
- One well known story of altruism is that of Paul Rusesabagina, the manager of a luxury hotel in Kigali, Rwanda during the 1994 genocide in which 800,000 people were killed.
- Paul chose to use the hotel to shelter 1,200 people, even though it meant putting his own life at risk.
- In the end, those people survived thanks to his brave acts.
Module 5: Abnormal Behavior, Treatment of Abnormal Behavior, and Social Psychology > Week 10 > Lesson
- Today, we’ll be taking a look at social psychology.
- What is it? Social psychology is the study of how others influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
- This looks at the inferences that people draw about the causes of events, other’s behavior, and their own behavior.
- Basically, what causes people to act the way that they do? One major bias in attribution is the tendency to attribute someone’s behavior to internal causes.
- Here, we take a look at the causes or triggers of stress and anxiety.
- Make sure you look at this week’s reading and read about Zimbardo’s prison experiment.
- Other things that affect our behavior are cognitive dissonance and social facilitation.
- When this occurs, we oftentimes revise our beliefs and continue the negative behavior.
- Social facilitation is the difference in behavior that we experience while we are being watched doing a task versus doing that task and being alone.
- Also influencing our thoughts, feelings, and our actions is our perception.
- We often associate someone as friendly and confident if we view them as good-looking.
- Do we let our first impressions of someone affect our perception of who they really are? And lastly, our stereotypes.
- More specifically, stereotypes are the thoughts and beliefs about people strictly because of their group membership.
- Closely related to stereotypes are prejudice and discrimination.
- Stereotypes are the thoughts and beliefs about people strictly because of their group membership.
- Another thing that contributes to the influence on our thoughts, feelings, and actions is attraction.
- What contributes to attraction, and what are the results? We’ll look at four things that contribute to attraction.
- Other aspects of social influence include the Chameleon Effect and persuasion.
- Research shows us that people are less likely to help someone when in groups than when they are alone.
- Groupthink is the pressure to conform to the group- very similar to conformity- and social loafing is when individuals produce less work when they are working in groups than by themselves.
- Social psychology explores whether aggression is a result of our instinctual nature, whether it’s in our genes, is it a result of a possible psychological disorder, or could it simply just be hormones? Altruism is actions designed to help others with no obvious benefit to the helper.
- If you remember this week’s video, we talked about the Rwandan genocide and the actions of Paul Rusesabagina.
- This has been our look at social psychology, and thank you so much for joining us.
