Clinical Psychology Flashcards
(17 cards)
Criteria for Determining Mental Illness
Context of the behavior: Appropriate or odd?
Persistence of behavior: Infrequent bizarre behavior is one thing, but it’s not okay to keep at it
Subjective distress: Are your thoughts, feelings, or behavior causing you or your loved ones distress?
Psychological handicap: Is the problem impacting your life satisfaction?
Effect on functioning: Does the problem impair how you function in life? May be the most important factor in diagnosis
Rosenhan’s research
Are mental health professionals really able to distinguish between mentally ill and mentally healthy people?
What are the consequences of mistakes?
Perceptions of Control
Most people expect to succeed in controlling their life circumstances, at least to some degree, because they’ve successfully exerted control in the past.
If the perception of control is lacking, they’re left with hopelessness and helplessness, which translates into depression.
learned helplessness.
Seligman: Our perceptions of power & control are based on experience. If you repeatedly fail to control your environment, you may stop trying altogether.
People are most likely to become depressed if they attribute their lack of control to causes that are
Permanent rather than temporary
Related to factors within their own personality rather than the situation
Pervasive across many areas of their life.
Pessimistic explanatory style: Failures are seen as global, dispositional, and permanent
Langer & Rodin
Does having some sense of control help nursing home residents improve their mental alertness, activity level, satisfaction with life, and other measures of behavior and attitude?
What is rumination
Repetitive thinking about difficult situations and their possible causes and consequences without moving into problem-solving mode
They also worry about future events and imagine everything that can go wrong
Behaviors linked to rumination
Binge eating Bulimia Cutting Substance abuse These behaviors represent an attempt to escape from the “aversive self-awareness and negative emotions” that rumination brings.
Overcoming Rumination
Spending 8-10 minutes a day on a pleasant, distracting activity decreases negative mood and improves thinking in depressed ruminators.
Physical exercise, hobbies, meditation, and spending time with others helps.
Find an activity that is engaging and distracting but is not maladaptive or dangerous.
Depressed ruminators may need help and encouragement to initiate these activities
Wegner
Putting things out of mind actually brings them to mind.
When you try to keep a single neutral thought out of mind
You’re likely to notice it returning to mind for days.
Distraction will only make you think of it MORE often
Related ideas may remind you of it, but the thought itself is unlikely to remind you of those related ideas.
You may think about it without even realizing you’re thinking about it but become conscious of it after someone asks you what you were thinking.
It may pop up in your dreams, more so than if you tried to think about it deliberately.
Theory of Ironic Processes of Mental Control (Wegner
The attempt to stop a thought initiates 2 mental processes—a conscious operating process that searches for anything to think about other than the unwanted thought—and an automatic monitoring process that searches for the unwanted thought.
They work together normally to produce mental control.
The unconscious monitoring system alerts you to the unwanted thought entering consciousness. Ironically, the monitoring process increases the mind’s sensitivity to the unwanted thought & thus increases the likelihood that ti will return
Amplifier Hypothesis
The hypothesis that though we might expect suppression to help briefly, it will eventually amplify the person’s problem.
Evidence is consistent with the amplifier hypothesis.
Martin & Tesser
Self-Regulatory Theories
People ruminate in an attempt to make progress toward important goals.
Rumination keeps information related to the goal in memory longer.
goals are structured in hierarchies and that people pursue lower-level goals (e.g., losing weight) in order to reach higher-level ones (being happy).
Linkers
maintain that lower-level goals are necessary for the attainment of higher level goals,
report greater rumination, negative affect, and unhappiness; rumination mediates this relationship
nonlinkers
generally happier than linkers.
They’re more likely to focus on their current enjoyment rather than attainment of their goals.
They seem more oriented in the present & don’t worry as much about their future goals.
Less likely to ruminate and less likely to perform behaviors associated with negative affect.
Effects of Disclosure on Outcome Measures (writing about emotions)
Reduced # of doctor visits
Better immune function
Short-term lowered autonomic (stress) activity
Improved natural killer cell activity & liver enzyme levels
Higher GPA
Faster reemployment following job loss
Reduced absenteeism from work
Better mood & well-being (self-report)
Few reliable changes emerge using self-reports of health-related behaviors.
