PSYC 337 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Maladaptation, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Natural Selection
10 Jan 2018
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Document Summary
What is psychopathology: the ds of abnormality. Dangerous-causing harm to the person and others. Dysfunction: an organ system performing contrary to its design. importantly, not at the peak of its design. Brain is designed to functions (thinking, feeling, emotion regulation) The definition is flawed because not all deviance is dysfunction, e. g. good tennis player or musicians are deviant from the rest of society. It also presumes we understand the functions of organs, which is not true (the function and design of the brain, personality, emotions, etc. : the lillienfeld critique. Hard to distinguish between (behavioral) adaptation and adaption by- product/secondary adaptation. Natural selection depends on variability, dysfunction is a necessary component of variation. Most traits are dimensional, it"s hard to define the threshold. How to distinguish adaptation to maladaptation (e. g. depression/withdraw might be a way to adapt to a hopeless situation) harmful and distress is hard to define (e. g. bipolar don"t necessarily experience distress)
