Abnormal Psychology: Past and Present

1. Abnormal Psychology:Past and Present Chapter 1

2. Tips for Effective Studying • Establish a quiet place, free of distractions, where you do nothing but study. • Schedule your study time. • Set specific goals each week (reading the text, watching the videos, reviewing notes, writing out flashcards, utilize the learning curve, taking mastery quiz). • Sleeping immediately after you study will help you retain more of what you have learned.

3. Abnormal Psychology: Scientific study of abnormal behavior in an effort to describe, predict, explain, and change abnormal patterns of functioning

4. What Do We Mean by Abnormality? ABNORMALITY

5. What Is Psychological Abnormality? • “The Four Ds” • Deviance • Distress • Dysfunction • Danger

6. The Elusive Nature of Abnormality • We may be unable to apply our definition consistently.

7. The Elusive Nature of Abnormality • Society selects criteria for defining abnormality and uses those criteria to judge particular cases

8. Insanity Legal term • Defendant is/was unable to know right from wrong • Experiencing a mental disorder at the time of a crime does not mean that person is insane.

9. Insanity ~2/3rd acquitted by reason of insanity: schizophrenia • vast majority: history of past hospitalization, arrest, or both • ~86% are male • ~ 65% of cases involve violent crime • ~15% of those acquitted are accused specifically of murder

10. Treatment

11. What Is Treatment? • Procedure designed to change abnormal behavior into more normal behavior • Requires careful definition

12. What Is Treatment? Three essential features: • A sufferer • A trained healer • A series of contacts through which healer tries to produce certain changes in the sufferer’s emotional state, attitudes, and behavior

13. What Is Treatment? • Surrounded by conflict and confusion: • Lack of agreement about goals or aims • Lack of agreement about successful outcome • Lack of agreement about failure • Are clinicians seeking to cure? To teach? • Are sufferers patients (ill) or clients (having difficulty)?

14. How Does Culture Affect What Is Considered Abnormal?

15. Culture-Specific Disorders

16. Multicultural Psychology Seeks to understand how culture, race, ethnicity, gender affect behavior/thought and how people of different cultures, races, and genders may differ psychologically

18. What Do Clinical Researchers Do? • Research: systematic search for facts through use of careful observations and investigations • Challenges: • Assessing private thoughts • Monitoring mood changes • Calculating human potential • Must always ensure rights of research participants, both human and animal, are not violated

19. Sources of Information

20. Case Studies

21. Observational Approaches

22. Forming and Testing Hypotheses

23. Sampling and Generalization

24. Measuring Correlation

25. Measuring Correlation

26. Correlations and Causality

27. Manipulating Variables: The Experimental Method

28. The Experimental Method • Allows researchers to ask questions such as: • “Does a particular therapy relieve the symptoms of a particular disorder?” • “Does drug X work better than drug Y?” • See table 1-4 for comparisons of correlational and experimental method