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[MUSIC].
Good morning. This is this is Abnormal Psychology.
If you showed up for German 101, you're in the wrong place.
this is lecture 1. We're going to talk this morning about
what is abnormal and what is abnormal psy, psychology.
We'll talk a little bit to begin with about the the goals or purposes of this
course. to begin with we're going to be reviewing
the traditional psychological and psychiatric disorders and dysfunctions.
the American Psychiatric Association has a manual called the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of mental disorders, and it has become pretty much the
official listing of diagnoses. And we'll sort of use that as a guide the
text book use that, uses that as a guide to talk about the the different
disorders. but we'll also be talking about the DSM
and kind of critiquing it as a method of thinking about diagnosis and, and it's
way of conceptualizing things. There are alternative ways of
conceptualizing things, and as we go through the course, I'll talk a bit about
alternative ways in which we might think of disorders alternative systems about
thinking of them, let's say, as dimensions, rather than as categories.
And alternative ways of grouping disorders.
I'll talk about the description of the disorders and I will try to in many
instances, at least give you some examples of cases from my own experience.
they'll be disguised and combined in some instances.
But I hope that we can talk about some real cases.
Just to give you a quick bio, I did my graduate work in clinical psychology at
the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I did an internship at the VA in
Milwaukee, where I worked on an inpatient service for a year there.
And then, worked for a couple of years. My first job was at UCLA Neuropsychiatric
Institute which is the Department of Psychiatry there.
And again, spent spent a couple more years working with in-patients in, in a
serious mental illness setting. [COUGH] Since then, I've been professor,
first the University of Pittsburgh, and then here and all during that time I've
supervised graduate students who've been seeing cases in training and have had a
small private practice of my own. So, I've got, I have to count them up,
30-some years of seeing various patients. And so, we'll try to give you some more
real life descriptions of examples of some of these disorders.
We'll talk about the epidemiology and demographics of the disorder, that is who
tends to develop the disorder. What's the incident in the general
population, what is the general, what is the age at which these disorders tend to
first appear etcetera. I'm also tried to talk a bit about the
etiology or causes of the disorder. What's, what do we know either
theoretically or empirically from the research, about factors that contribute
to the origins of the disorder. and this will include biological,
psychological and environmental. and this will be kind of a theme through
the course is to look at this, the kind of, the three dimensions of cause
and effect here. What's the, what are the biological risk
factors, the environmental risk factors and the psychological risk factors and
what are the biological, psychological and environmental implications of the
disorders. and finally, we'll talk about treatment
implications. This, this is not a course about
psychotherapy. But when we talk about how we
conceptualize the disorder, that conceptualization leads to them, what
would you do about the disorder? How would you intervene?
How would you try to modify or[UNKNOWN] the problem?
So, there are always implications for treatment.
Second kind of theme for the course is abnormal psychology and psychology in
general as a kind of scientific endeavor. Talk about how we how we study these
disorders. how we learn about them, how we
conceptualize them, what are the assumptions underlying our conceptual
systems? what paradigms theories and models are,
are do people use to think about the disorder?
And how does theory influence how we look at disorders?
If we take a behavioral perspective or a cognitive perspective.
How do we understand or think about our biological perspective the particular
disorder. when we talk about disorders, we often
have a kind of implicit theory, we are making certain assumptions.
And often, we are not aware of those assumptions.
And part of the idea to talk about this is to try to be aware of, of the
assumptions we're making when we think about disorders.
I like your textbook, in part, because it tries to be integrative.
Rather than saying, this is the biological approach, and this is the
psychological approach, and this is the kind of an environmental approach.
It, it tries to put them together into, and talks about how the inter, how they
interact, how biological risk may interact with psychological factors.
And that these may under stress from the environment produce the particular
disorder. why is the material in this course
important and why should you why might you want to be here taking this course?
Well some of you may may be interested in careers in mental health.
let me just get a show of hands of people who are thinking, okay yeah, some people
who want to go on in this area. And some of you may already be involved
in some form of mental health work. so for some of you, it'll be a, a kind of
a precursor and a beginning introduction to the topic that you'll be involved in
later. If you're not sometime in your life, if
you haven't already, you are likely to encounter true examples of abnormal
psychology and abnormal behavior amongst friends, family, co-workers even
yourself. and having some basic knowledge about
approaches may help you to respond to be helpful to make choices to be helpful,
etc. beware of being quick to diagnose, I've
there's a tendency when you take this course, to say, ah-huh, I knew my Uncle
Joe was you know, fit this diagnosis. or the medical student's syndrome is to
find every diagnosis in yourself and decide that you have 16 clinical
diagnoses as you go through the as you go through the the book.
But some awareness, I think is, is a valuable tool in life in general.
in addition we're all citizens in a society that deals with mental health.
There are mental health systems, private systems and there's public systems for
dealing with mental health in the city, the county, the state etcetera.
And we sometimes are faced with issues in policies with regard to how, how are we
as a society, society are going to deal with different issues.
do we want a halfway house in our neighborhood?
Or do you really want to live next to the Harris County psychiatric clinic over
there? Or what are we, what are we doing with
our homeless. and we note here that at the moment the
prison system in Texas is the largest provider of mental health services in the
state. this is a public policy issue as to how
we deal with mental health problems. it also has implications for violence and
crime for, certainly for the prison system and for issues of health and
medicine. behavioral psychological health has lots
of implications for physical health and vice versa.
how our mind and body interrelated in the development of disorders.
abnormal psychology and the law, we'll about a little bit at the end of the
course. In particular about insanity pleas and
competence to stand on trial and what this means and how legal definitions may
or may not fit with psychological definitions.
Okay, a a typical way to start out with the course is to define the material.
What is abnormal and what is abnormal psychology?
And I'm not going to do that, at least not yet.
I'm going to ask you, I'm going to give you some case examples and ask you what
is it about this case that makes it abnormal.
I don't want, I don't want a diagnosis. We may know what the diagnosis is.
But what, why is it that we label something as abnormal?
In the first example a person is constantly worried about germs and
contamination. Wash their hands 60 times a day for five
minutes each with very hot water, wears gloves during a lot of the other time and
changes gloves, gloves frequently. It occurred to me that I could have just
skipped that and said, what about Tony Shalhoub on Monk on, on, TV.
Why would we think that his behavior or a, a, a hand washer that I'm describing,
is abnormal? Remember, push your button to, to speak.
Anybody? Okay.
>> [INAUDIBLE].
>> Press, press the button.
>> What button?
>> the little, there's a microphone on you're.
>> Oh.
>> Okay.
When the green light's on, you're on.
>> It's on the flat part of the[UNKNOWN] that says push.
>> Oh, okay.
Oh, I'll hold it. Okay well, his actions aren't necessary
like just to live. He doesn't have to do all those things
just to live this normal life.
>> Okay. Not necessary to, I'm starting out with
misspellings already.
>> Necessary. Alright any other ideas?
>> It would interfere socially.
>> Okay, good.
Yeah I did it.
[NOISE].
I've become completely unable to spell when I have to do it.
Any other thoughts? What what makes this abnormal?
>> How about because it's extremely
excessive behavior?
>> Okay. Any other on this one?
>> Well, as Doctor Phil says, he says,
anything that's not normal is something that disrupts your daily life or
something.
>> Okay, disrupts daily life. Okay, any other thoughts on this one?
Let me give you another example here. This is a postcard sized thing that was
handed out on a street corner to a roommate of mine in college.
I'll read it to you. what, Dear Citizen, What I write effect,
what I write effects your most intimate action.
The government has had, for eight months, the quote all-seeing eye mind reader.
I know because I reported it to intelligence.
It sees for miles into your office or bedroom, it reads minds, thought images,
and picks up voice audio for miles. From this equipment, no secret is hidden.
I have been persecuted by the government for reporting this to intelligence.
They have *** my mind of valuable thoughts and ideas.
Why and who is keeping the Los Angeles Police Department in just plain John Doe
or a lawyer, merchant, stock broker, gambler, business man, from having a mind
reader. Who gets the money for crushing?
And I cut out the name here. Who stopped x correspondence to
Washington? Apparently, it had been writing to
Washington about this and somebody stopped the correspondence.
Will you be persecuted for mentioning the mind reader or for questioning the
government? who sought to alienate x from his
relatives, friends and associates? Somehow, people are not reacting well to
him. any electronics man can understand the
maser. I know because I had electronics in the
air force. I know how they had the all-seeing eye
and mind reader in the, in the government and I defy the government to deny this.
I solicit help, monetary or otherwise, from any quarter in bringing about a
public announcement, public demonstration of the all seeing eye mind reader and the
audio mind conditioner. Those who have the all seeing eye mind
reader on me now, may be guilty of treason.
And then, it says, if they're not the government, let the government stop them.
Please call the Russ Hotel. Mail does not seem to be getting through.
because the check aren't coming in the mail to support his fight against the all
seeing eye mind reader. Is that abnormal?
Lots of people stand on street corners and hand out postcards.
with things they'd like you to donate to. What makes this one, what makes us think
that there might be some abnormal process going on there?
[NOISE] Nobody thinks it's abnormal? Any?
>> do we have to hold it?
>> You got to press.
>> Oh, I was going to say that I don't
necessarily think that he's abnormal, a little eccentric or extreme.
But it might be just something, how he's viewing reality.
That might be he's not viewing it the same way everybody else does.
>> Okay, so we've got something here about
his, view of reality. Not quite right somehow.
>> Anybody else want to take a shot at this
one?
>> There's a sense of paranoia about it. Like he's paranoid at about everything.
>> Okay.
good diagnosis, but and I'll put it down. But why do we say paranoia?
What, what's, paranoia is a type of abnormality.
What makes paranoia abnormal?
>> Well, it seems like he's just like culturally not in tune what everyone else
is thinking.
>> So he's thinking.
>> Okay.
>> Not like everyone else.
>> Okay.
>> It's not typical behavior.
>> Not thinking like others. Anybody else?
>> He's asking people to act in a way that
most people would find him reasonable.
>> Okay. So, getting ready, getting used to this
pen. I think.
Okay. Any other thoughts?
What, what makes this example? Why do we?
They're, this is, you know, it's, it's something like the, you know, there's the
famous, whatever, Supreme Court Justice who said of ***, I don't know how
to define it, but I know it when I see it.
The, this, well, it's a little bit of this quality in here.
You know it when you see it. But why do we, why do we know it?
Why, why, what is it that makes us say, boy, that guy, I want to stay away from
him.
>> It's the conspiracy of it, I think. it feels like the society is conspiring
against him or against a group of people specifics around him.
>> Okay.
So, there's he sees a conspiracy as of part of society.
Anybody else? Okay just to give you another a common
example a person who can't leave home except with let's, well, let's make it a
woman who can't leave home except with her husband, to go to the store, shopping
mall, or her mother's house. She's too fearful to go anywhere else.
She has anti, anxiety attacks, feels sick, feels like she's smothering or
going to die, even though she knows there's no objective danger when she goes
anyplace, tries to go anywhere else. What makes that abnormal?
Yes.
>> [UKNOWN] she goes out. You know, she has to wait for something
when she really needs something. She can't get it unless sometbody else
goes with her.
>> Okay, so you said not healthy. But it's also what, dangerous, in a
sense, for her. Okay, anybody else have any thoughts on
that one?
>> Her fear goes outside of what we consider normal fear[UNKNOWN].
>> Okay.
So, what, what we're getting here is another, another example of both perhaps
disrupt stable life excessive. It's, it's, it's fear is bigger than it
should be, somehow, we don't see that. let me give you another slide here, what
about this one? That's another thing that I, I think I
found in my mailbox, one time. Spenders & Debtors Anonymous.
This is a 12 step program for people who run up their charge cards.
Should that be abnormal psychology? Is it, is that, or is that just poor
planning.
>> I think it could depend on how much they're spending and what they're
spending it on. Like, if they're seeming to have to spend
money, that would be different than just buying things because they think they're
pretty or something.
>> Okay. So it, it's what not in their control, a
need, or something like that?
>> It could be. I mean, it depends on the person that
you're talking about, I guess.
>> Okay. alright.
Anybody else have any thoughts on that example?
Are you addicted to money? If you have money problems, can you be
addicted to money?
>> Spending can almost be like eating, obesity, like it can really get out of
control.
>> Okay. So, this, this problem like other
problems could be considered like it's a, a control problem.
Okay, any other thoughts? Okay.
what about an 85 year old man who exposes himself in his front yard to a 14 year
old girl, who's walking past?
>> Purposely?
>> Pardon?
>> Purposely?
>> Purposely.
>> [LAUGH].
>> Let's say it's well, let's, let's ask questions.
Would it make a difference if this was the first time versus a long history of
doing this? What if I said that he didn't remember it
afterwards and was seemed to be confused about where he was and what time of day
it was. Would those things make a difference?
>> Well, it would certainly make a
difference if he has Alzheimer's or something like that and he doesn't know
or doesn't remember what he does.
>> Okay. So, tell me the difference.
>> Well, one would be on purpose and, and
would show some kind of moral issue or, or some kind of issue with with this in
a, in a *** nature. And one would be a, a, a pure lack of
understanding what's going on.
>> Okay. So, we have here, something that's,
that's, that has to do with kind of a moral intent to violate norms.
I'm erasing that one, but I'm going to put down violate norms.
Hard to write.
>> The, what appears is a little bit after you've written it.
So, it's kind of.
>> I think, again, it has to do with control.
If he has no control about those urges.
>> Okay.
>> Or if he just doesn't realize what he's doing.
>> Okay.
And not, so again, a, a different version of not in control.
what about an excessive fear of snakes? Lot's of people don't like snakes, I've
talked to people who won't go near a lawn or grass, because there just might be a
snake. Won't go to the zoo at all, because there
might, there's a snake house there. require that somebody preview any
magazine that comes into the house, because there might be a picture of a
snake in it. and doesn't allow anyone in the household
to watch either a western or a jungle movie because you never know when a snake
might appear. let's, anybody want to give a quick
thought on that one?
>> maybe they had a bad experience and every time they think of a snake, then they
just recall that bad experience, so they get, get nightmares or fears or
something.
>> Okay. So, you're, you're talking about etiology
there, a little bit about how, how to explain why it might of become that way.
But what is that, why, how does that make it abnormal?
Because, they've had, an, an unusual experience, was it?
>> They could have reoccurring flashbacks of
that event.
>> Okay.
>> That could cause them to fear even more.
>> I'm just going to put down bad experience.
I'm trying to remember how to do a new sheet here.
Nope. Okay, any other thoughts on the snake
phobia?
>> it sounds like just, you know, loss of control.
The irrational fear is controlling them again.
>> Okay.
again, we're starting to get repeats here on some topics.
okay, I could give you some other examples.
What about suicide, that's an interesting one to debate.
What about suicide bombers these days? A child was angry, refuses to go to
school, disruptive at, at home, doing poorly in school.
Is this abnormal psychology or, you know, parent, parenting problems?
I've seen, I got this I didn't make a slide of this.
This is in The National Psychologist, how to treat clients addicted to the
internet. All about internet addictions.
is that abnormal psychology. I, I also read, recently I saw something
on the, on the internet about road rage disorder.
we, should that be included in the next version of the DSM?
It's not there yet. Well, let me, what I want to derive from
this is to say that you've come up with, now, a, a little over a page of different
thoughts about what might make something abnormal.
And I want to kind of present the argument to you that you can reduce this
down to about three different concepts that tend to be involved.
One of them has to do with and I'm, I'm going to call it, distress to the person.
And here's where we're talking about, having a lack of sense of control.
Feeling helpless in the face of your fear.
Or your addiction to spending or whatever it might be.
People know, often, that their behavior is irrational and excessive, and limits
their lives but nevertheless they continue to repeat the behavior.
And why people behave in an irra, in an irrational way is part of what we are
going to be talking about through the whole course.
I find it difficult to make changes or control these behaviors.
Albert Bandura, the well-known psychologist, once argued in a book that
this should be, this should be the only criteria.
We should help people change who feel that they are distressed and can't
control their behavior that's distressing them.
He argued that, that should, that's, that's number one and that that's what
abnormal psychology and psychotherapy, behavior therapy or whatever, should be
about. we can kind of ask the question about
these three things that I'm going to bring up.
That's number one. Is, are they necessary or sufficient?
Is it necessary for us to call something abnormal, let the person be stressed by
it. Is it sufficient for that to be a
definition? The guy who was passing out the cards was
probably not distressed by what we think was abnormal.
You know, he was distressed about the eye seeing all mind machine, but he wasn't
distressed about the fact that he believed in the all seeing, all seeing
eye mind machine. so the second criteria is, and I'm
going to call it, distress to others. This suggest that there's a ss, kind of a
social judgement about the appropriateness of the, of the behavior.
family, friends, society in general are upset about the the exhibitionist
and about the this guy who's trying to solicit money because he, of the
government conspiracy that we are doubtful about.
part of what's distressing to us or makes it seem unusual as, as a social
judgement, is the fact that it's inexplicable.
That is there's a, we can't attribute it to normal motives.
We don't understand why a person can only go to the store with her husband.
And it's too fearful to walk down the block otherwise alone.
That's beyond our normal understand of motives.
We don't see the danger that she seems to see in those kinds of, of situations.
You know, we understand behavior that maybe to avoid real dangers or we
understand behavior that involves gratification or profit or self
validation. But we don't understand excessive forms
of that, of, of some of those things. excessive forms, the exhibitionist again,
or the alcoholic, or the if we, if we extend the analogy, the spender etcetera.
In some instances, this is we see a violation of social norms.
They're doing something, not only that it's inexplicable, but it's sort of
against our ordinary rules. It's negative and there's one of the
things we'll talk about is the stigma of mental illness.
And, and various attempts through the history of talking about abnormal
behavior and mental illness, to reduce the stigma.
Well, perhaps there's always some stigmatization process that goes on
because we're, we're, because it's a violation of norms.
Because it's something that's outside of our expectations.
And so, there's always a sort of a negative cast to it.
Now, this is greater in some instances than in others.
Here, we come again to one of the borders of what is what do we consider abnormal
physiology versus what do we can consider moral deviance, what do we consider
criminal behavior. it's an interesting discussion we'll get
into child molestation is in the diagnostic manual as a, a, a, as a
disorder. But molesting sexually an adult, is not.
and there was a, a real decision made that we don't want to, we don't want to
give someone an excuse to explain away *** assault.
but why do we do it with children? Why do we have a diagnosis in there,
there for children? Is, is, you know, and some things may be
criminal as well as being diagnosable in a sense.
And so, there, there's a border there that we sometimes dis, disagree about.
and again, notice that some behaviors are distressing because of their excesses
Alcoholism. Others in a, in a sense, because of their
deficits, the inability to do things that normal people do.
Third criteria is that things are, and these are, in some ways, overlapping, but
maladaptive or dysfunctional. And this is an attempt to be somewhat
more objective about a definition to think in more objective terms although it
may, in fact, be nothing more than another way of saying distressing to
others. and that it always, always tends to
involve some social judgement. statically deviant would be part of this.
Inappropriate to time and place which says that it's, that it's a relative
thing. if you're, if you sing arias to yourself
loudly and you do so as a farmer out on your tractor in the middle of the field,
we probably don't consider that abnormal. If you're a taxi driver and you start
singing loudly when you have passengers in your taxi we might start wondering
what's going on here. This person is not, that's not their role
to be singing. it's not appropriate to the time and and
place. this get, starts to get us, also, into
talking about the difference between, sort of, qualitative and quantitative
models of deviance. Somethings are a different kind of
behavior. some of the psychotic behavior.
when, if somebody tells you they're hearing voices in their head and they
know that the voices are inside their head.
and it's talked to a woman one time who said she was receiving messages from the
planet Venus that were being transferred through a crystal at the bottom of the
ocean. And she wanted to tell people about these
important messages. that's qualitatively different.
That's a different kind of of thinking. And we're pretty much sure, although, I
used that once as an example, and someone in the class said, well, maybe.
Maybe she was, how do you know that she wasn't?
In any case, that, that's a qualitative thing versus something that might be
quantitative, that might be just a matter of degree.
The fear of snakes. Again, lots of people have a little fear
of snakes. They're not really comfortable with
picking up a snake or something like that.
But it's a matter of degree. How much does it interfere with your
life, etcetera. notice the medical diseases by enlarge
are qualitative. You either have the germ the flu, a virus
or you don't. But some disorders in medicine are
quantitative. High blood pressure is kind of arbitrary
cutoff as, as to at what point is your blood pressure considered to be high.
And we have some of the same kinds of issues in abnormal psychology.
There have been some attempts, and let me see where I am in this, to kind of write
single phrases. These are the three things that I've just
talked about. Distress to the person, distress to
others, maladaptive. Wakefield used this phrase, unexpectable
harmful dysfunction. This kind of got it, most of the things
that I'm just talked about in there. Unexpectable is the idea that it, it
doesn't fit our expectations, our understanding of, you know, but we can
and we have difficulty explaining it. it's not what we expect.
It's harmful. so there's a negative social judgement
about it and it's dysfunctional. Meaning that it's probably leading to
problems for the person. Your text, Barlow & Durand have
psychologically, psychological dysfunction associated with distress.
Again, personal distress, could be distress of others.
Impairment in functioning that is not a typical or culturally expected response.
And again, we get the same kind of elements in this definition.
[NOISE] Uh,[SOUND] I'd like to point out again that, that we have difficulty here
deciding or being able to say what's absolutely necessary to, to calling
something abnormal and, and what's sufficient.
in some instances one of these things may be sufficient.
distress to the person may be sufficient to define phobias of certain kinds.
People may function all right. I've known people who fly on airplanes,
but have this terrible fear of flying. And I knew a woman, I talked to a woman
one time who she flew, but it sort of wiped her our for three days.
She, she needed a day of kind of preparation where she couldn't do
anything because she was so anxious before the flight.
The day of the flight she'd take a couple of *** and maybe a couple of drinks on
the plane. Then, a day recover from all that.
so that she would go travelling when, with her husband when he went places, but
she always figured a three day window for, for a, a flight.
Now, so she's functioning but functioning, maybe not too well.
But she is very distressed, and so her personal distress certainly would be
sufficient in that instance. And again, in other instances, the person
may not be distressed, but others are stressed about the behavior.
we get into issues of, of, what our people's rights, what are, just odd or
eccentric behaviors what are the boundaries with medical disorders, with
legal issues, with moral issues and with changing social norms.
We do have changing ideas sometimes about what is abnormal?
New things get added, that tends to be the, the tendency and the DSMs from one
addition to the next in the diagnostic list.
But somethings also get taken out. we do have things that are, in fact,
don't and we'll talk a little bit later on, for instance, about the history of
homosexuality. and when it was a diagnosis and how
society's change in view led to changes in the diagnostic system.
Also, I want to point out that there are special purpose definitions that's kind
of already included in what I've just talked about for certain purposes.
In the legal area, again, you have insanity.
insanity is a legal term and it's not a, not a psychological term.
And it has it's own it's own parameters and it's own definitions about
understanding right from wrong and what you're doing and this sort of thing.
Competence to stay on trial is another legal has a history of legal precedent
about what it means. and it goes back to the idea that you
should be able to be present when you are involved in a court proceeding.
If you're accused of a crime or whatever, you should be present.
And the question is, are you mentally present?
Can you be mentally present to assist in your own defense?
And not competent to stand trial, trial means that you're not competent to be
mentally, you're not mentally present. Your not able to do the things you need
to do to defend yourself. research often has other, many other
kinds of, of special purpose definitions having to do with, with whether, your,
your history, your history of hospitalizations, your history of
disorders or with things like your past response.
And you'll see studies of tricyclic antidepressant responsive depressives,
versus non-responsive, they're people who have responded to one medication.
As if we're now trying to look to see what's the difference between the people
who do respond and who the people who don't respond to some particular
medication. We also have other interesting ideas
brought over from medicine and we'll talk about the, how the medical model gets
applied here. managed care has the idea that what
should be paid for in a managed care system is returning you to your prior
normal level of functioning. Not making you better, but bringing you
back to baseline. So that if at baseline you weren't doing
fairly well, all they needed to do was bring you back to baseline.
and that'll be the, you know, sort of again, what they'll reimburse as the
ultimate idea. But return of function is is a concept
that sometimes leads to difficulties when we attempt to apply it to
psychopathology. I think I got, oops, nope.
Well, let me kind of wind up this topic by saying that we have the various
components of what's abnormal and inexplicable social deviance, etcetera.
societies need to deal with these problems.
we need to deal with problematic behavior.
and various societies have different limits as these kinds of what's tolerable
etcetera, and we'll talk about some interesting examples of that.
Societies have changed their view. we tend to be having an increased in the
number of things that we tended to see, particularly in the area of things like
addictions. Again, internet addiction, etcetera.
we change in our views of things. tobacco is now listed in the abuses,
abusive substances in the DSN. so, society has certainly changed its
view over the last decade or two about smoking.
Question, comment?
>> Is any kind of addiction considered abnormal?
>> I couldn't quite hear you.
>> Is, is any kind of addiction considered
abnormal?
>> Well, that's, that's a good question. what, what we seem to be doing is
applying this concept of addiction to more and more things.
And it, it, it, it's, what, what are the limits of it.
And that's a topic, actually you just sort of that's your first term paper is
to tell me what you think about such things.
and, now not to we'll go into this more when we talk later about substance abuse.
But what, what happened is, is there was an initial definition of addiction that
said you had to have with, withdrawal and tolerance, defined addiction.
But then, the DSM people decided to expand that, and they put in a whole list
of other criteria that you spend a lot of your time planning how you're going to
get your supply of the substance. That you you drink more than you intended
or you do more of the activity than you, than you intended.
and once you start adding those kinds of criteria, then you can apply it to more
and more things. can you have a jogging addiction.
I ran further than I really intended this morning.
I spend a lot of time thinking about when I'm going to be able to go jogging again.
do I have an addiction? I, I, I jog instead of fulfilling my
social obligations to someone else. the, the, the addiction is a particularly
kind of problematic area because you can apply these new criteria to just about
anything. And people are coming up with new things
almost every week, it seems. so that's already in, in an issue of
definition and, and of sort of where do we set limits of, of how we apply this.
there are lot, lots of other areas. An interesting discussion going on these
days in the research on post-traumatic stress disorder.
The old criteria said that it had to be a trauma that is outside of ordinary
experience. Well, then they sort of made, or made the
argument that unfortunately there are lots of traumas that are not that
uncommon that produce PTSD symptoms. Well, now we're getting PTSD over all
sorts of things. Second hand PTSD from being exposed to
somebody who is exposed to danger. And all sorts of other kind of extensions
of the of the concept. And partly, it it is indeed a matter of
definition. Where do you set the criteria?
the criteria in the, in the DSM often are lists of symptoms, and you have to have a
certain number out of the, out of that list.
if you define depression as having 5 out of 9 symptoms, what happens if you say,
well, maybe you really only need 4. How, how many more people to you, do you
add to the pool of the depressed, when you, when you make that quantitative?
decision to change the, the nature of the criteria.
these there, there are kind of continuing arguments about all of this, and there
are shifts. Actually, I, I haven't done this, taped
this course, for a couple years. I haven't taught it.
So, so, it, it really kind of surprised me as of, of going through my notes, the
number of things that have changed, the number of conceptualizations or the, or
the research that has added a, a new fact or a different way of looking at some of
the disorders, just within the last couple years.
This is this is an evolving topic and what we include and don't include, and
what what we consider within this topic. I talked a little bit about Thomas Szasz,
who said we're moving towards universal patienthood.
you know, if you look at the epidemiological studies something like
20% of people may have a disorder at the moment.
That's means 1 in 5. Look around you.
that seems like a lot to, to me. well, should it be, but where should we
set the cut off in a sense is what we're talking about.
We think, we tend to think in qualitative discreet category terms, you have the
disorder or you don't, but really, there are lots of continua involved in this.
Well, I'm going to kind of switch topics here and start into the topic, give you
the introduction to the topic of talking about theories and paradigms, paradigms.
I tend to pronounce it paradigms or paradigms.
The dictionary accepts both. I had a course feedback one time, why
does he keep saying paradigms when the word's paradigm?
So, I'll try to say paradigm. we understand disordered behavior through
various kinds of paradigms, and theories, and models.
A paradigm is a broad set of assumptions about how a science is conducted.
How should we look at the topic? What are our basic assumptions about the
nature of the topic? Within a particular paradigm, there may
be different theories. They may accept, accept the basic
assumptions about how you study the topic, but there may be different, more
specific theories. The kind of classic example of this is we
all have, know a little bit about this from the history of astronomy.
Although, the idea that the sun was the center of the solar system and had really
been around for many centuries. they're tended in Europe to be the
belief, held partly by the church, that the the Earth the Earth[NOISE].
Alright, what am I doing here? I can't get the earth here.
Did I press the button again? All right.
Imagine the Earth.
>> [LAUGH].
>> and the, the thought that its the center of the universe.
Well, that works pretty well, it works great for the moon.
It works pretty well for the sun. We see the sun rise and set in a very
regular way. It works pretty well for the stars.
problem is the planets. The planets do strange things in their
motion through the skies if we think that they're circling around the Earth.
And there are various theories about that.
People accepted the paradigm, we're at the center of the universe.
They're circling around us. How can that be that they go back and
forth in these strange ways? Well, there are various theories of
epicycles. Their orbit goes like this or it's like
that. It's, they are different, there are
different ideas about that they try to fit to predict the the way in which the
planets moved in the sky by this. Then you had people come along and start
to question this. Galileo started looking through a
telescope. He saw moons revolving around Jupiter.
That doesn't work if everything is supposed to be revolving around the
around the Earth. He looked at Venus and saw phases of
Venus, like phases of the moon. That doesn't work if, again, if they're
both rotating around us. and the actual more definitive one you
hear less about Tycho Brahe was I think, Danish nobleman lived on an island, his
own island. And he had a telescope, a very good
telescope, and he took very careful observations.
Every night, he kept observations about when things rose and, and where they were
in the sky, and such. the other thing I remember about Tycho
Brahe is he had a silver nose. He'd been in a duel, and someone cut off
his nose. And so, he had a silver sterling silver
nose made to replace it. he made the observations, but he didn't
have the math to figure that out. He gave his observations to Johannes,
Johannes Kepler and Kepler started to fit these measurements to the models to test
the, the models and the theories. It didn't work that you, you couldn't
predict from the usual theory. You couldn't predict the planets.
So, he started trying to do a paradigm shift and looked at a different, from a
different paradigm. What if the sun is at the center and the
Earth and the planets are rotating around the sun?
Aha, things start to fit. Except, the other, the, the theory that
Kepler went to when he shifted paradigms was, this is God's creation, all orbits
must be perfect circles. Right?
That's, that's theory. So now, he starts trying to fit his
measurements to perfect circles. It doesn't work.
They're not perfect circles. And they'll, so he now has to come up
with a new theory and look at parabolic orbits.
And aha, now the data seem to fit. So, we, we have this as an example of
what is thought of as sort of the process of science.
We have a paradigm. And Kuhn talks about revolutions in
science,k, u, h, n. And, what Kuhn says is, you have a
paradigm and you have normal science operating under that paradigm.
People are making their observations and they're studying things within the idea
that the earth is the, is the center. And then, along comes some some data that
draws this into question. We focus our attention on those data.
We focus our attention on those problems with this approach.
And then, we, somebody comes along with a new paradigm.
And we, there's a paradigm clash. there tend to be proponents of one
paradigm versus the other. And evidence is collected and the new
paradigm wins over. Well, that's the model of what it should
be like, and how science should progress. It doesn't always.
It's an interesting book by Michael Mahoney, called Scientist as Subject.
Does science really percieve this way? Are we always convinced and move from on
paradigm to the other on the basis of fact?
Well, not always. One of the examples, I remember he's
giving is, there were, when, before we landed on the moon, there were two
different, very distinct theories about the nature of moon rocks type.
They were of type a or they were of type b, and two sides held their views very
strongly and argued with another about what the nature of the moon was.
We sent somebody up there. They picked up some moon rocks, brought
them back, we looked at them, they're type a.
The type b people said you went to some really weird place on the moon to find
those rocks. The rest of the moon is going to be made
up of type b rocks. Science, the facts, don't always persuade
and we tend to have people who hold onto theories.
Well, unfortunately, that's very much the case in psychology.
We have multiple paradigms. And sort of one paradigm doesn't replace
another, it sort of gets added to the list, and we, and we have multiple
paradigms. We have psycho-dynamic paradigms and
biological and behavioral and cognitive ways of talking about the science and how
we should approach thinking about psychology, in general, and abnormal
psychology in particular. and we'll talk about I'm going to give
you a little bit of a review of those. I think, in the next lecture.
and talk about how they, they have different ways of looking, but also, and
again, along with the theme of the textbook, how we can think of kind of
integrating pers, the different perspectives.
another comment I want to make in general about theories and paradigms is that they
are all, they're metaphors or analogies. We are saying that this one thing
functions as if it were like this other thing.
We make little models of the universe. And say, this is this is a model of how
things function. And we think about the universe through
our models. Think of the theory as being like a map.
It's an abstraction of certain aspects of something.
if you, get a road map, if you go to downtown Houston, they aren't really blue
and red lines there, there, there are streets.
But we abstract them as different kinds of lines.
And that's an abstraction that's very useful.
It helps us to predict and, and control and get to where we want to go.
there are limits, because abstractions are always abstractions for per, for
certain purposes. I remember when I moved to Pittsburgh, I
wanted to go to a certain address, looked it up on the map.
Here was this street and here was a street right next to it.
And this street was easy to get to, but this one seemed odd, that you had to go
way around this way. So, why don't we just go here, and then I
can just go over a block. Well, I went there, and there's a reason
you couldn't go over a block. This was on a cliff, about 300 feet above
the street below. So, you couldn't just find a little cross
street. They didn't abstract the cliff in the
road map. They just abstracted the the streets.
And theories are like that. They abstract certain things.
They focus on certain things. They decide what's important.
Now, if you wanted to drill for oil, you wouldn't want a street map.
You'd want some kind of geological map about the strata of the Earth and such,
in different locations. To think so you can think of different
kinds of maps being abstractions for different purposes.
And different theories sort of do that or different paradigms.
They, they, their decisions about what's important, and what to abstract, and how
that will help us to get around in the topic of our in, interest.
These theories and abstractions, then influence how we think about things.
Influenced how I thought about roads that I thought were going to be right next to
each other. We sort of see things, sometimes, through
out models. We assume that, that every instance is a,
is going to be a perfect instance of our model of something.
our models become, sort of, lenses through which we think, see things.
And we, we make distinctions as a function of our our con, concepts in our
models and theories. natural language is like that.
We as finished reading an interesting book by Marvin, Melvyn Bragg called The
Autobiography of the English Language, something kind of like that.
And he talks about how English evolved and how words evolved and how different
people, even within English would, would make different kinds of distinctions.
In how words came to mean different things for different groups of English
speakers. we know that different societies, for
instance, have breakup colors slightly differently.
some the, the whole red, orange spectrum is one color.
Others, other societies might break it up into, maybe three colors, while we break
it up into two. The Eskimos don't have a, a word for
snow. They have 13 words for snow.
They see very distinct different snows. our constructs and theories in
psychology, similarly, influence how we see things, how we define things, how how
we diagnose disorders. And I will stop there and we'll pick up
the topic of models historically in psychology in the next lecture.