Differences, Clinical psychology and Happiness

The main questions are:

  1. How we are different from other people?
  2. Why we are different from other people?

The main difference in 2 persons are:

Personality

To measure the personality we use reliability and validity.

Harrower-Erickson Multiple Choice Rorschach Test is a test which was used earlier to test personality, although there is no way to test its validity.

Inkblot test: Harrower-Erickson Multiple Choice Rorschach Test

The big five personality factors:

  1. Neurotocism - Stability (N)
  2. Extrovert - Introvert (E)
  3. Openness to experience - Non openness (O)
  4. Agreeableness - Antagonism (A)
  5. Conscientiousness - Undirectedness (C)

This is the Big five test (OCEAN) and it is stable and there is a way to validate it.

Big Five Personality Test

Intelligence

People have different opinion about what intelligence means. Charles Spearmen defined intelligence as two factors, i.e. general intelligence (g, accounts for similarity) and specific ability (s, accounts for differences).

Behavioural genetics

We are different because of these regions:

  1. Genes and environment
  2. Nature vs Nurture

The findings of behavioural genetics:

  1. High heritability in all cases when talking about psychology
    1. The flynn effect: We use same scale to test IQs for people of different generations. If we dont use the same scale, then we can see that the average IQ is rising rapidly in the last 70-100 years.
  2. Rest of the variance in a group comes from non shared environment.

Parenting

Shared environment does’nt matter. Parents dont matter in IQ, they just impact the hereditory part. Their parenting technique does’nt matter. Peers matter more than the parents.

Clinical psychology

Also known as psychopathology.

Notions of mental disorders

  • Can be due to demonic obsession
  • Social deviance from a behaviour

Schizophrenia

  • About 1% of world populations suffers from this.
  • Its not multiple personality disorders.

Symptoms:

  1. Hallucinations (auditory callings)
  2. Delusions (believing something)
  3. Disorganized speech
  4. Disorganized behaviour
  5. Absence of normal cognition

Subtypes of schizophrenia:

  1. Paranoid schizophrenia (delusions of persecution and grandeur)
  2. Catatonic (unresponsive to surrounding, parrot like speech, purposeless movement)
  3. Disorganized (delusions and hallucination, disorganized speech)
  4. Undifferetiated

The basic malfunction is unable to sequence your thoughts and corrdinate them. Further problem arises due to loss of contact. Too much dopamine is found in schizophrenic patients. Possible causes early on can be oxygen deprivation while birth, prenatal infections or difficult family circumstances.

Mood disorders

Main types are depression and bipolar disorder

  1. Depression
    1. Severed depressed mood that lasts more than two weeks.
    2. No resonable cause for this.
    3. Women are more affected then men
    4. Almost 15% people affected from this.
    5. It is heritable.
    6. Low level of neropinephrine and serotonin can cause depression.
    7. The most serious manifestation of depression is suicide.
    8. Suicide is contagious.
  2. Bipolar disorder
    1. Other less comman depressive disorder is bipolar disorder which occurs in 1% population.
    2. It is highly heritable, affects different part of brain then mentioned above.
    3. It has interesting association with creativity.

Anxiety disorder

  • Vague feeling of fear and apprehension
  • Everyone experiences it. It becomes problem when it is irrational, uncontrollable and disruptive.
  1. Generlized anxiety disorder
    1. Every 1 in 20 people experience it
    2. It has geentic component
    3. Headaches, stomach aches, muscle tension, irritability
    4. Related to major childhood trauma due to which one can become hyperviigilance.
  2. Phobias
    1. Intense, irrational fears of objects, things, etc.
    2. It may be caused by classical conditioning
    3. Preparedness theory: We are psychologically prepared for phobias. We have phobias of things which can harm us due to evolution.
  3. Obsessive compulsion disorder
    1. Obsession are irrational disturbing thoughts.
    2. Compulsions are repetetive actions performed to alleviate obsession.
    3. Serotonin is involved in OCD in some way.

Disassociative disorder

  • People are unaware of things around them
  • Unable to recall under some circumstances
  • It is disassociative of memory
  1. Dissociative amnesia
    1. We lose some memory. In some cases, we lose information about ourselves.
    2. This can be caused by a trauma.
    3. Also known as psychogenic amnesia
  2. Disassociative fugue
    1. Also known as psychogenic fugue
    2. We go out of home, settle somewhere else and completely forget where we lived or about our life.
    3. This stage is called fugue state
  3. Disassociative identity disorder
    1. Originally multiple personality disorder
    2. Mostly affects women
    3. Can be cause due to abuse as a children

Therapy

  1. Psychodynamic therapy:
    1. focus on underslying causes and not symptoms
    2. Multiple sessions per week
    3. Freud is assocaited with it
  2. Behaviour therapy
    1. Skinner is associated it
    2. Tratment of phobias
  3. Cognitive therapy
    1. Talk to therapy and find ways to correct it
    2. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) which uses all three.
  4. Medication interventions
    1. Medicines
    2. Use electroconvulsive therapy
    3. Transcranial magnetic stimulation

Happiness

When asked how happy you are (on a scale 1-10), people generally say around 7-8.

When asked the question on sunny/rainy day, people are happier on sunny day.

Happiness is a goal state animals have evolved to pursue, a signal that needs to be satisfied.

  1. Happiness does’nt change as much as we think
    1. Happiness is highly heritable
  2. Happiness is influenced by absolute and relative factors.
  3. Our judgement about the pleasure and pain of past events are skewed.