Abnormal Psych Study Guide
Exam 1
Terms
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Abnormal psychology - The scientific study of abnormal behavior undertaken
to describe, predict, explain, and change abnormal patterns of functioning.
Asylum - A type of institution that first became popular in the sixteenth
century to provide care for persons with mental disorders. Most asylums
became virtual prisons.
Clinical Practitioners – Workers in this field of anormal psychology that take
the data/knowledge from clinical scientists
Clinical Psychologists – Psychologists concerned with the assessment and
treatment of mental illness and disability.
Clinical Scientists – Workers in this field of anormal psychology that gather
information systematically so that they can describe, predict, and explain the
phenomena they study.
Culture – A people’s common history, values, institutions, habits, skills,
technology, and arts.
Danger – The possibility of suffering harm or injury.
o Individuals whose behavior is consistently careless, hostile, or confused
may be placing themselves or those around them at risk.
o Although danger is often cited as a feature of abnormal psychological
functioning, research suggests that it is actually the exception rather than
the rule (Bonnet et al., 2016). Most people struggling with anxiety,
depression, and even bizarre thinking pose no immediate danger to
themselves or to anyone else.
Deinstitutionalization – The practice, begun in the 1960s, of releasing
hundreds of thousands of patients from public mental hospitals.
Demonology –
Deviance – The fact or state of departing from usual or accepted
standards. (different, extreme, unusual, perhaps even bizarre)
Distress – Extreme anxiety, sorrow, or pain. State of danger/difficulty and in
need of help. Suffering caused by lack of money or the basic necessities of life.
(unpleasant and upsetting to a person)
o According to many clinical theorists , behavior , ideas , or emotions
usually have to cause distress before they can be labeled abnormal
Dysfunction – Deviations from the norms of social behavior considered as bad.
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o Abnormal behavior tends to be dysfunctional; that is, it interferes with
daily functioning. It so upsets, distracts, or confuses people that they
cannot care for themselves properly, participate in ordinary social
interactions, or work productively.
o Perhaps the ultimate psychological dysfunction is behavior that becomes
dangerous to oneself or others.
Eccentricity – Being eccentric {a person of unconventional and slightly
strange views or behavior}
o The dictionary defines an eccentric as a person who deviates from
common behavior patterns or displays odd or whimsical behavior.
o Society may have trouble separating an abnormality that requires
intervention from an eccentricity, an unusual pattern with which others
have no right to interfere.
o Researcher David Weeks (2015) suggests that eccentrics do not typically
suffer from mental disorders.
o Eccentricity is chosen freely and provides pleasure.
Exorcism – Conducted by a Shaman or priest, it is the expulsion of evil spirits
from a person or place.
Humors – According to the Greeks and Romans, they are bodily chemicals
that influence mental and physical functioning.
Hypnotism – A procedure in which a person is placed in a trancelike mental
state during which he or she becomes extremely suggestible. (psychogenic
treatment)
Moral Treatment – A nineteenth - century approach to treating people with
mental dysfunction that emphasized moral guidance and humane and respectful
treatment.
Multicultural Psychology – The field of psychology that examines the impact
of culture, race, ethnicity, gender, and similar factors on our behaviors and
thoughts and focuses on how such factors may influence the origin, nature, and
treatment of abnormal behavior.
o Multicultural psychologists seek to understand how culture, race,
ethnicity, gender, and similar factors affect behavior and thought and
how people of different cultures, races, and genders may differ
psychologically.
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Norms – A society’s stated and unstated rules for proper conduct.
Private Psychotherapy – An arrangement in which a person directly pays a
therapist for counseling services.
- Psychiatrists – A physician who in addition to medical school has completed
three to four years of residency training in the treatment of abnormal mental
functioning.
- Psychoanalysis – Either the theory or the treatment of abnormal mental
functioning that emphasizes unconscious psychological forces as the cause of
psychopathology.
o Freud’s work eventually led him to develop the theory of
psychoanalysis, which holds that many forms of abnormal and normal
psychological functioning are psychogenic (Nicholson et al., 2016).
o Freud also developed the technique of psychoanalysis, a form of
discussion in which clinicians help troubled people gain insight into their
unconscious psychological processes. He believed that such insight, even
without hypnotic procedures, would help the patients.
- Psychogenic Perspective – The view that the chief causes of abnormal
functioning are psychological.
- Psychotropic Medications – Drugs that mainly affect the brain and reduce
many symptoms of mental dysfunction.
o They included the first antipsychotic drugs, which correct extremely
confused and distorted thinking; antidepressant drugs, which lift the
mood of depressed people; and antianxiety drugs, which reduce tension
and worry.
- Somatogenic Perspective – The view that abnormal psychological functioning
has physical causes.
- State Hospitals – State-ran public mental institutions.
- Therapy / (Treatment) – A procedure designed to change abnormal behavior
into more normal behavior. A systematic process for helping people overcome
their psychological problems. Therapy consists of a client (patient), a trained
therapist, and a series of contacts between them.
o Jerome Frank, all forms of therapy have three essential features:
 A sufferer who seeks relief from the healer .
 A trained, socially accepted healer, whose expertise is accepted by
the sufferer and his or her social group.
 A series of contacts between the healer and the sufferer, through
which the healer . . . tries to produce certain changes in the
sufferer’s emotional state , attitudes , and behavior .
- Trephination – An ancient operation in which a stone instrument was used to
cut away a circular section of the skull to treat abnormal behavior/expel evil
spirits.