Lecture 7 Personality (2) Flashcards
What are 2 types of disorders?
- Neurological disorder: any disorder ofthe nervous system. Structural, biochemical or electrical abnormalities in the brain, spinal cord or other nerves can result in a range of symptoms.
- Mental Health disorder: behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. Usually defined by a combination of how a person behaves, feels, perceives, or thinks.
2+ ways to diagnose a Frontal Lobe Disorder
Clinical history:
- Frontal lobe disorders may be recognized through a sudden and dramatic change in a person’s personality.
Mental State Examination:
- Speech problems, with reduced verbal fluency.
- Typically lacking in insight and judgment, but does not have marked cognitive abnormalities or memory impairment (as measured for example by the mini-mental state examination).
- With more severe impairment there may be echolalia or mutism.
- Primitive reflexes (also known as frontal release signs) such as the grasp reflex.Akinesia (lack of spontaneous movement) will be present in more severe and advanced cases.
Furtherinvestigation:
- A range of neuropsychological tests are available for clarifying the nature and extent of frontal lobe dysfunction.
4 ways to measure issues in personality
- Questionnaires.
- Psychometric/Neuropsychological tests.
- Neuroimaging.
- DSM-5 diagnosis (personality disorder).
Constraints of Questionnaires for Personality
“Personality” is sometimes taken to mean the set of variables that result from questionnaire measures, but this confuses the instruments with the constructs
What abilities are tested for Frontal Lobe Dysfunction?
What is a commonly used test to diagnose frontal lobe injury?
- To measure the ability of the patient to sequence events logically and temporally, to reason abstractly, and to behave spontaneously.
- A very commonly-used test to diagnose frontal lobe injury is verbal fluency; the Controlled Oral Word Association test.
What is the Tower of Hanoi?
- Neuropsychological test to measure variance of planning ability between the subject and controls.
- Planning is a key component of the problem solving skills necessary to achieve the objective (move the entire stack to another rod, obeying the following rules:
- Only one disk may be moved at a time. Often 7-9 discs
- Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the rods and sliding it onto another rod, on top of the other disks that may already be present on that rod.
- No disk may be placed on top of a smaller disk.
Frontal Lobe damage/disorders take many forms, but their impact on cognition & behaviour depends on ______ & ______
their location and how they disrupt normal neuronal functioning.
Frontal lobe issues generally big, problematic.
Symptoms of Frontal Lobe Damage
- Making inappropriate comments.
- Alteration in patience and tolerance of others.
- Depression.
- Not responding appropriately to social cues.
- Socially inappropriate sexual comments or behaviors.
- Increased or decreased interest in sex.
- Insomnia.
- Attention and concentration problems.
- Difficulty solving complex problems.
- Slowed critical thinking.
- Increased or decreased talkativeness.
- Lack of spontaneous facial expression.
- Movement impairments.
- Language difficulty.
- Impulsive, dangerous behaviors.
- Substance abuse.
Issues in diagnosing Frontal Lobe Damage
- we may not know their baseline “normal”;
- many of these on a spectrum– mental health disorders will be a ”disorder” when it gets in the way of quality of life/living a normal life;
- symptoms may be temporary, due to stress
Frontal Lobe Damage:
Pseudodepression
Pseudodepression:
(Pseudo: they are not necessarily depressed, but symptoms result from FL damage…)
- Lack of drive
- Loss of interest.
- Lack of motivation.
- Reduced verbal spontaneity.
(flat affect -A severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. Common in depression and schizophrenia, e.g., monotonous voice, diminished facial expressions, appear extremely apathetic
Basic duties of the prefrontal cortex
- personality
- decision-making
- planning,
- forming plans/ideas
- managing social relations.
- motor function,
- problem solving,
- spontaneity,
- memory,
- language,
- initiation,
- judgement,
- impulse control,
- social and sexual behavior.
Psyeudopsychopathy
- Impulsiveness.
- Immaturity.
- Lack of restraint.
- Sexual promiscuity.
- Foul-mouthedness.
(Manic symptoms)
General Cognitive Symptoms
(assoc. with Frontal Lobe Damage)
Deficits in:
- Planning and strategy formation.
- Attention.
- Memory. (free recall,
- Olfactory function. (detecting odours, either one or both nostrils;
Dysexecutive Syndrome was formerly known as ______.
Why the change?
The syndrome was once known as frontal lobe syndrome, however dysexecutive syndrome is preferred because it emphasizes the functional pattern of deficits (the symptoms) over the location of the syndrome in the frontal lobe, which is often not the only area affected
Dysexecutive Syndrome is a __________disorder, not a mental health disorder
Neurological
BPD infographics
regardez
What is one of the most accepted therapy modalities for BPD?
(hint: DBT)
What does it do?, What are its strategies?
Dialectical behavioral therapy:(one of the most accepted modality of therapy)
- Found to attenuate amygdala hyperactivity at baseline, which correlated with changes in a measure of emotion regulation and increased use of emotion regulation strategies.
- Teaches to notice emotion, tolerate it, and in doing so, regulate the emotion
- Teaches interpersonal skill development.
- Great therapy to be aware of
•
Strategies of DBT:
- Mindfulness.
- Tolerating stress/distress.
- Emotional regulation.
- Interpersonal Effectiveness.
