PSYC 435 Abnormal Psychology Exam Questions and Answers Latest 2024 (GRADED)

PSYC 435 Abnormal Psychology Exam Questions and Answers Latest 2024 (GRADED) Identify how culture can influence the definition of Abnormal Psychology. - Labeling, stigma and stereotyping - Number 13 in Christian countries vs Number 4 in Japan - Culture can shape the clinical presentation of disorders like depression, which are present in cultures around the world. Cultural interpretation and expression of abnormal psychology is not known well. - A case in point is taijin kyofusho. This syndrome, which is an anxiety disorder, is quite prevalent in Japan. It involves a marked fear that one’s body, body parts, or body functions may offend, embarrass, or otherwise make others feel uncomfortable. Often, people with this dis-order are afraid of blushing or upsetting others by their gaze, facial expression, or body odor. - Latino descent, ataque de nervios or an “attack of nerves” is a clinical syndrome that does not seem to correspond to any specific diagnosis within the DSM. Triggered by stressful event, symptoms are crying, trembling and uncontrollable screaming, sense of being out of control, can be physically or verbally aggressive, faint or have a seizure-like fit but then can return to normal as if nothing happened. 5. Identify the professionals responsible for working on the mental health “team.” - Psychiatrist: prescribe medications and monitors for side effects - Clinical Psychologist: individual therapy meeting with patient several times a week - Clinical Social Worker: helps patient resolve family problems. - Psychiatric Nurse: checks daily to provide support and help cope better in hospital setting. - Team of professionals can be different in outpatient. Can be just the psychiatrist (medication and psychotherapy) but some receive meds from the psychiatrist but go see a psychologist or a clinical social worker for therapy. Some see a counseling psychologist, a psychoanalyst, or a counsellor. 6. Explain the difference between the prevalence and the incidence of mental disorders. - Epidemiology: the study of the distribution of diseases, disorders, or healthrelated behaviours in a given population. Mental health epidemiology is the study of the distribution of mental disorders. - Prevalence: the number of active cases in a population during any given period of time. Percentages of the population that has the disorder, etc. - Point prevalence: the estimated proportion of actual, active cases of a disorder in a given population at a given point in time. For example, if we were to conduct a Abnormal Psychology (PSYC 435) Athabasca University PART ONE study and count the number of people who have major depressive disorder (i.e., clinical depression) on January 1 of next year, this would provide us with a point prevalence estimate of active cases of depression. - 1-year prevalence figure: count everyone who experienced the disorder at any point in time throughout the entire year. - Lifetime prevalence: an estimate of the number of people who have had a particular disorder at anytime in their lives (even if recovered). - Incidence: the number of new cases that occur over a given period of time (typically one year). 7. Discuss the prevalent rates of mental disorders. - - - - Comorbidity: presence of two or more disorders in the same person, higher in severe disorders. Abnormal Psychology (PSYC 435) Athabasca University PART ONE 8. Explain inpatient and outpatient treatment. - Outpatient treatment requires that a patient visit a mental health facility practitioner, but the patient does not have to be admitted or stay overnight. A patient may attend a community mental health center, see a private therapist, or receive treatment through the outpatient department of a hospital. - Hospitalization and inpatient care are preferred for those needing more intensive care. Deinstitutionalization. 9. Describe and explain the benefits and dimensions of the various research approaches. - Acute: short in duration - Chronic: long in duration - Etiology: causes of disorders - Case Studies: can be subject to bias because the writer decides what they include. Low generalizability: they cannot be used to draw conclusions about other cases even if it is similar. Conclusions can be narrow and mistaken. Can illustrate clinical material. Limited support for a particular theory or provide some negative evidence that can challenge a prevailing idea or assumption. - Self-Report Data: This might involve having our research participants complete questionnaires of various types. Another way of collecting self-report data is from interviews. The researcher asks a series of questions and then records what the person says. Misleading, people might not report themselves well, lying, misinterpreting the question, desire to present themselves as favorable, not always accurate or truthful. - Observational Approaches: depends on what we are trying to see. We can use direct observation, for example having trained observers record the number of times children who are classified as being aggressive hit, bite, push, punch or kick playmates. Might also look at biological variants (heart rate) as well as hormones etc. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imagining (fMRI) used to study the working brain and can study blood flow to various parts. There is also Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) which generates a magnetic field on the surface of the head where we can stimulate underlying brain tissue. Painless and noninvasive while a person is sitting. Using TMS, we can even take a particular area of the brain “off-line” for a few seconds and measure the behavioral consequences. In short, we can now collect observational data that would have been impossible to obtain in the past. 10. Describe the process of doing research. - Generate a hypothesis (an effort to explain, predict or explore something), which is normally tested. Design studies to help them approach an understanding of this. - Sampling: try to select people who are representative of the much larger group of individuals with panic disorder for example. Abnormal Psychology (PSYC 435) Athabasca University PART ONE - Samples of convenience: study groups of people who are easily accessible to them and are readily available. - External validity: the extent to which we can generalize our findings beyond the study. - Internal Validity: reflects how confident we can be in the results of a particular given study; is the extent to which a study is methodologically sound, free of confounds, or other sources of error, and able to be used to draw valid conclusions. - Comparison group (control group) is used to test hypotheses, group of people who do not exhibit the disorder being studies but who are comparable in other major respects to the criterion group (people with the disorder being studied). - Correlational research: involves studying the world as it is, does not involve manipulation of variables. Researcher selects certain groups of interest and compares the groups on a variety of different measures. - Positive correlation vs negative correlation (inverse correlation) vs uncorrelation - Correlation coefficient: denoted by symbol r. Correlation runs from 0-1. + and – represents the direction of association. Positive means higher scores on one variable are associated with higher scores on another. Negative means as scores on one go up, the other goes down. - Statistical significance: the probability that the correlation would occur purely by chance is less than 5 out of 100 (p.05) - Effect size: reflects the size of the association between the variables. - Meta-analysis: a statistical approach that calculate and then combines the effect sizes from all the studies. - CORRELATION DOES NOT MEAN CAUSATION. - Third variable problem: To use an example from abnormal psychology, it was once thought that masturbation caused insanity. This hypothesis no doubt arose from the fact that, historically, patients in mental asylums could often be seen masturbating in full view of others. Of course, we now know that masturbation and insanity were correlated not because masturbation caused insanity but because sane people are much more likely to masturbate in private than in public. In other words, the key factor linking the insanity and masturbation (and the unmeasured third variable) was that of impaired social awareness. - Retrospective research: looking back in time, collect info about how patients lived before which could be associated with what went wrong later. - Prospective research: looking ahead in time, focus on people before the disorder manifests. - Longitudinal design: study that follows people over time and that tries to identify factors that predate the onset of a disorder. - Direction of effect problem: correlational research does not allow us to draw any conclusions about directionality. - Experimental research: - Independent variable: one manipulated Abnormal Psychology (PSYC 435) Athabasca University PART ONE - Dependent variable: one that changes. - Random assignment: every research participant has an equal chance of being placed on treatment or no-treatment condition. - Standard treatment comparison study - Single-case research designs: case studies used to develop and test therapy techniques within a scientific framework. - Double-blind study: neither subjects nor experimenter knew who got magnets (placebo vs not placebo). - ABAB design: A (baseline condition, collect data), B (introduce treatment), A (withdraw and collect data), B (reinstate treatment). - Analogue studies: study not the true item of interest but an approximation of it