PSY 2130 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Prevalence, Homeostasis, Heritability

• School: University of Iowa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 2130
• Professor: Habashi Meara

Document Summary

Psychopathology-the study of your mental health state. Studied in the area of clinical psychology- the study of individuals, by observation or experimentation, with the intention of promoting change (witmer, 1907) Study normal human behavior to distinguish it from abnormal behavior. Also study abnormal behavior to define what normal is (brain damage, causes dysfunction. Statistical deviance: has to be statistically rare in your population, infrequent and uncommon rarity alone is not enough (ex. Genius in the iq distribution ): genius is rare, but its not clinically abnormal because it does not create problems in adapting to life; in the same way depression. Huge number of people that could be clinically diagnosed with a disorder (due to depression) Nimh study: 56 million people in us adults meet criteria for mental disorder in 1996, meaning many mental disorders are not really rare. But, only 25% of these people receive any type of treatment: 2.