Final Flashcards
What is the onset age of Schizophrenia?
20s to 29
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a disabling disorder characterized by perceptual, emotional, and intellectual deficits, loss of contact with reality, and inability to function in life.
A psychosis
What are the acute symptoms of Schizophrenia?
Acute symptoms develop suddenly and are typically more responsive to treatment.
What are chronic symptoms of schizophrenia?
Symptoms that develop gradually and persist for a long time with poor prognosis are called chronic
What are brain deficits associated with schizophrenia?
OFTEN PRESENT AT BIRTH
- ) Hypofrontality - less gray matter under activation of the frontal lobes might explain the dopamine deficiency because it has less myelination
- ) Most patients have enlarged ventricles
What is the glutamate hypothesis for schizophrenia?
The glutamate theory states that schizophrenia is due to a dopamine imbalance meaning reduced glutamate activity.
NMDA receptors block the glutamate neurotransmitters and reduces dopamine
What are the effects of antipsychotics?
Blocks dopamine receptors in post synaptic receptors
tardive dyskinesia - tremors and involuntary movements caused by blocking of dopamine receptors in the basal ganglia.
What are characteristics of depression?
person often feels sad to the point of hopelessness for weeks at a time, loses the ability to enjoy life, relationships, and sex, and experiences loss of energy and appetite, slowness of thought, and sleep disturbance.
What is the difference between unipolar and bipolar depression?
Unipolar - alternates with normal emotional states.
Bipolar - the individual alternates between periods of depression and mania.
What are characteristics of bipolar disorder?
Also called manic depressive illness - periods of depression that alternate with excessive, expansive moods (or mania)
What is mania?
excess energy: decreased need to sleep, increased sexual drive, and abuse of drugs are common.
What is the monoamine hypothesis for depression?
depression involves reduced activity at norepinephrine and serotonin synapses.
Increase activity of NE and 5HT at synapse
What are brain deficits in anxiety disorder patients? Two neurotransmitters and 3 brain areas
BENZODIAZEPINE RECEPTORS
involve deficits in GABA and serotonin
Brain areas involved in anxiety include areas of the limbic system:
amygdala - negative emotions
locus coeruleus - drugs help reduce the anxiety produced by this area
parahippocampal gyrus - may explain the learning and memory deficits
What is intelligence?
Intelligence is the ability to reason, to understand, and to profit from experience.
What did the Lumper intelligence theorists believe in? Maybe take out but Splitter instead
Lumpers claim that intelligence is overall intelligence for all abilities, which is usually called the general factor, or simply g.
What are 3 capabilities related to intelligence?
linguistic - temporal/frontal lobe
logical-mathematical
spatial.
Declarative Memory
Known as facts and information which can be stated or described.
Located in the hippocampus and nearby cortical regions that communicate with it
Nondeclarative memory
Shown by performance rather than conscious recollection
What happens if someone damages their hippocampus?
May disrupt declarative and relational memories but no affect on Nondeclarative
Learning and Memory deficits occur for new things like retrograde or anterograde amnesia
What are characteristics of Korsakoff’s syndrome?
A memory disorder, related to a thiamine deficiency, that is generally associated with chronic alcoholism. Often accompanied with confabulation ( to fill in a memory gap with a falsification) and anterograde/retrograde amnesia
What is anterograde amnesia?
Difficulty forming new memories for learning and memory and damage in the hippocampus
What can patient H.M. do because of Nondeclarative memory?
He can do the mirror drawing task, the tower of Hinoi, tasks requiring Nondeclarative memory
A patient who, because of damage to medial temporal lobe structures, was unable to encode new declarative memories
What happens for the consolidation of memories?
Consolidation is the process in which the brain forms a more or less permanent physical representation of a memory (info in short term memory is transferred to long term)
What area of the brain is associated with the Nondeclarative learning type of skill learning?
The basal ganglia