Vocabulary

Alogia: A reduction in the amount of speech and/or increased pausing before the initiation of speech.
Amnesia: The loss of memory.
Anhedonia: Loss of interest or pleasure in activities one previously found enjoyable or rewarding.
Anhedonia/amotivation: A reduction in the drive or ability to take the steps or engage in actions necessary to obtain the potentially positive outcome.
Antisocial: A pervasive pattern of disregard and violation of the rights of others. These behaviors may be aggressive or destructive and may involve breaking laws or rules, deceit or theft.
Antisocial personality disorder: Counterpart diagnosis to psychopathy included in the third through fifth editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM; APA, 2000). Defined by specific symptoms of behavioral deviancy in childhood (e.g., fighting, lying, stealing, truancy) continuing into adulthood (manifested as repeated rule-breaking, impulsiveness, irresponsibility, aggressiveness, etc.).
Anxiety disorder: A group of diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) classification system where anxiety is central to the person’s dysfunctioning. Typical symptoms include excessive rumination, worrying, uneasiness, apprehension, and fear about future uncertainties either based on real or imagined events. These symptoms may affect both physical and psychological health. The anxiety disorders are subdivided into panic disorder, specific phobia, social phobia, posttraumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
Attributional style: The tendency by which a person infers the cause or meaning of behaviors or events.
Avoidant: A pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation.
Borderline: A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity.
Borderline Personality Disorder: This personality disorder is defined by a chronic pattern of instability. This instability manifests itself in interpersonal relationships, mood, self-image, and behavior that can interfere with social functioning or work. It may also cause grave emotional distress.
Catatonia: Behaviors that seem to reflect a reduction in responsiveness to the external environment. This can include holding unusual postures for long periods of time, failing to respond to verbal or motor prompts from another person, or excessive and seemingly purposeless motor activity.
Chronic stress: Discrete or related problematic events and conditions which persist over time and result in prolonged activation of the biological and/or psychological stress response (e.g., unemployment, ongoing health difficulties, marital discord).
Cognitive failures: Every day slips and lapses, also called absentmindedness.
Consciousness: The quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.
Contingency management: A reward or punishment that systematically follows a behavior. Parents can use contingencies to modify their children’s behavior.
Cross-sectional design: Research method that involves observation of all of a population, or a representative subset, at one specific point in time.
Defensive coping mechanism: An unconscious process, which protects an individual from unacceptable or painful ideas, impulses, or memories.
Delusions: False beliefs that are often fixed, hard to change even in the presence of conflicting information, and often culturally influenced in their content.
Dependent: A pervasive and excessive need to be taken care of that leads to submissive and clinging behavior and fears of separation.
DES: Dissociative Experiences Scale.
Diagnostic criteria: The specific criteria used to determine whether an individual has a specific type of psychiatric disorder. Commonly used diagnostic criteria are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, 5th Edition (DSM-5) and the Internal Classification of Disorders, Version 9 (ICD-9).
DID: Dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder, is at the far end of the dissociative disorder spectrum. It is characterized by at least two distinct, and dissociated personality states. These personality states – or ‘alters’ - alternately control a person’s behavior. The sufferer therefore experiences significant memory impairment for important information not explained by ordinary forgetfulness.
Disorganized behavior: Behavior or dress that is outside the norm for almost all subcultures. This would include odd dress, odd makeup (e.g., lipstick outlining a mouth for 1 inch), or unusual rituals (e.g., repetitive hand gestures).
Disorganized speech: Speech that is difficult to follow, either because answers do not clearly follow questions or because one sentence does not logically follow from another.
Dissociation: A disruption in the usually integrated function of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter in the brain that is thought to play an important role in regulating the function of other neurotransmitters.
Drug diversion: When a drug that is prescribed to treat a medical condition is given to another individual who seeks to use the drug illicitly.
Early adversity: Single or multiple acute or chronic stressful events, which may be biological or psychological in nature (e.g., poverty, abuse, childhood illness or injury), occurring during childhood and resulting in a biological and/or psychological stress response.
Episodic memory: The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life.
Fantasy proneness: The tendency to extensive fantasizing or daydreaming.
Five-Factor Model: Five broad domains or dimensions that are used to describe human personality.
Flat affect: A reduction in the display of emotions through facial expressions, gestures, and speech intonation.
Functional capacity: The ability to engage in self-care (cook, clean, bathe), work, attend school, and/or engage in social relationships.
General population: A sample of people representative of the average individual in our society.
Grandiosity: Inflated self-esteem or an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth (e.g., believing one has special powers or superior abilities).
Hallucinations: Perceptual experiences that occur even when there is no stimulus in the outside world generating the experiences. They can be auditory, visual, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste), or somatic (touch).
Histrionic: A pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking.
Hypersomnia: Excessive daytime sleepiness, including difficulty staying awake or napping, or prolonged sleep episodes.
Insomnia: A sleep disorder in which there is an inability to fall asleep or to stay asleep as long as desired. Symptoms also include waking up too early, experience many awakenings during the night, and not feeling rested during the day.
Lucid dreams: Any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming.
Magnetic resonance imaging: A set of techniques that uses strong magnets to measure either the structure of the brain (e.g., gray matter and white matter) or how the brain functions when a person performs cognitive tasks (e.g., working memory or episodic memory) or other types of tasks.
Malingering: Fabrication or exaggeration of medical symptoms to achieve secondary gain (e.g., receive medication, avoid school).
Mood disorder: A group of diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) classification system where a disturbance in the person’s mood is the primary dysfunction. Mood disorders include major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, dysthymic and cyclothymic disorder.
Narcissistic: A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy.
Neurodevelopmental: Processes that influence how the brain develops either in utero or as the child is growing up.
Nightmares: An unpleasant dream that can cause a strong negative emotional response from the mind, typically fear or horror, but also despair, anxiety, and great sadness. The dream may contain situations of danger, discomfort, psychological or physical terror. Sufferers usually awaken in a state of distress and may be unable to return to sleep for a prolonged period of time.
Obsessive-compulsive: A pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: This anxiety disorder is characterized by intrusive thoughts (obsessions), by repetitive behaviors (compulsions), or both. Obsessions produce uneasiness, fear, or worry. Compulsions are then aimed at reducing the associated anxiety. Examples of compulsive behaviors include excessive washing or cleaning; repeated checking; extreme hoarding; and nervous rituals, such as switching the light on and off a certain number of times when entering a room. Intrusive thoughts are often sexual, violent, or religious in nature...
Oppositional defiant disorder: A childhood behavior disorder that is characterized by stubbornness, hostility, and behavioral defiance. This disorder is highly comorbid with ADHD.
Paranoid: A pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent.
Parent management training: A treatment for childhood behavior problems that teaches parents how to use contingencies to more effectively manage their children’s behavior.
Pathologizes: To define a trait or collection of traits as medically or psychologically unhealthy or abnormal.
Personality: Characteristic, routine ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others.
Personality disorders: When personality traits result in significant distress, social impairment, and/or occupational impairment.
Positron emission tomography: A technique that uses radio-labelled ligands to measure the distribution of different neurotransmitter receptors in the brain or to measure how much of a certain type of neurotransmitter is released when a person is given a specific type of drug or does a particularly cognitive task.
Prevalence: The number of cases of a specific disorder present in a given population at a certain time.
Processing speed: The speed with which an individual can perceive auditory or visual information and respond to it.
Psychomotor agitation: Increased motor activity associated with restlessness, including physical actions (e.g., fidgeting, pacing, feet tapping, handwringing).
Psychomotor retardation: A slowing of physical activities in which routine activities (e.g., eating, brushing teeth) are performed in an unusually slow manner.
Psychopathology: Illnesses or disorders that involve psychological or psychiatric symptoms.
Psychopathy: Synonymous with psychopathic personality, the term used by Cleckley (1941/1976), and adapted from the term psychopathic introduced by German psychiatrist Julius Koch (1888) to designate mental disorders presumed to be heritable.
PTM: Post-traumatic model of dissociation.
Recurrent dreams: The same dream narrative or dreamscape is experienced over different occasions of sleep.
Schizoid: A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings.
Schizophrenia: This mental disorder is characterized by a breakdown of thought processes and emotional responses. Symptoms include auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking. Sufferers from this disorder experience grave dysfunctions in their social functioning and in work.
Schizotypal: A pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior.
SCID-D: Structural Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Dissociative Disorders.
Self-report measure: A type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator.
Sleep deprivation: A sufficient lack of restorative sleep over a cumulative period so as to cause physical or psychiatric symptoms and affect routine performances of tasks.
Sleep paralysis: Sleep paralysis occurs when the normal paralysis during REM sleep manifests when falling asleep or awakening, often accompanied by hallucinations of danger or a malevolent presence in the room.
Sleep-wake cycle: A daily rhythmic activity cycle, based on 24-hour intervals, that is exhibited by many organisms.
Social zeitgeber: Zeitgeber is German for “time giver.” Social zeitgebers are environmental cues, such as meal times and interactions with other people, that entrain biological rhythms and thus sleep-wake cycle regularity.
Socioeconomic status (SES): A person’s economic and social position based on income, education, and occupation.
State: When a symptom is acute, or transient, lasting from a few minutes to a few hours.
Suicidal ideation: Recurring thoughts about suicide, including considering or planning for suicide, or preoccupation with suicide.
Trait: When a symptom forms part of the personality or character.
Trauma: An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption, and that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person.
Triarchic model: Model formulated to reconcile alternative historic conceptions of psychopathy and differing methods for assessing it. Conceives of psychopathy as encompassing three symptomatic components: boldness, involving social efficacy, emotional resiliency, and venturesomeness; meanness, entailing lack of empathy/emotional-sensitivity and exploitative behavior toward others; and disinhibition, entailing deficient behavioral restraint and lack of control over urges/emotional reactions.
Vivid dreams: A dream that is very clear, where the individual can remember the dream in great detail.
Working memory: The ability to maintain information over a short period of time, such as 30 seconds or less.