Group+-+Chapter+15+-+Psychological+Disorders

**Abnormal behavior-** Behavior that is deviant, maladaptive, or personally distressful over a relatively long period of time
 * Defining And Exploring Abnormal Behavior**

**Theoretical Approaches to Psychological Disorders** **Biological Approach:** It attributes psychological disorders to organic, internal causes. This approach primarily focuses on the brain, genetic factors, and neurotransmitter functioning as sources of abnormality.

**Psychological Approach:** This approach emphasizes the contributions of experiences, thoughts, emotions, and personality characteristics.

**Sociocultural Approach:** This approach emphasizes the social contexts in which a person lives. This includes an individual’s gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, family relationships, and culture.

**Biopsychosocial Model:** When all the approaches and factors are a combination with one another.

**Anxiety Disorders** **Anxiety disorders-** Psychological disorders involving fears that are uncontrollable, disproportionate to actual danger the person might be in, and disruptive of ordinary life.

**Types of Anxiety Disorders** **Generalized anxiety disorder-** Psychological disorder marked by persistent anxiety for at least six months and in which the individual is unable to specify the reasons for anxiety.

**Panic disorder-** anxiety disorder in which the individual experiences recurrent, sudden onsets of intense apprehension or terror, often without warning and with no specific cause.

**Phobic disorder-** anxiety disorder characterized by an irrational, overwhelming, persistent fear of a particular object or situation.

**Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)-** Anxiety disorder in which the individual has anxiety provoking thoughts that will not go away and/or urges to perform repetitive, ritualistic behaviors to prevent or produce some future situation.

**Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-** Anxiety disorder that develops through exposure to a traumatic event that has overwhelmed the person’s abilities to cope.