Personality Disorders

Module 5.4d

LEARING TARGETS:

• What are the 3 clusters of personality disorders?
• What behaviors and brain activity characterize antisocial personality disorder?

Personality Disorders

• Disruptive, inflexible, enduring pattern of thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and interpersonal functioning that are stable over time and across situations,
• Deviate from the expectations of the individual’s culture
• Interfere with social functioning

Odd or Eccentric Personality Disorders�(Cluster A)

Paranoid Personality Disorder

• Pervasive mistrust and suspiciousness of others are the main characteristic

Schizoid Personality Disorder

• Is detached from social relationships
• Are true hermits, preferring life alone and avoiding intimate interactions at all costs

Schizotypal Disorder

• Exhibit the strange behaviors associated with schizophrenia but without the major symptoms (delusions, hallucinations)

Dramatic, Emotional, or Erratic Personality Disorders�(Cluster B)

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Histrionic Personality Disorder�

• Displays shallow, attention-getting emotions
• Goes to great lengths to gain others’ praise and reassurance.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder�

• Exaggerates their own importance, aided by fantasies.
• Find criticism hard to accept, often reacting in rage or shame.

Borderline Personality Disorder

• Unstable relationships & self-image
• Hard to control over impulses.
• See difference between Borderline Personality and Bipolar Disorder HERE.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

• Lack of a conscience
• Socially harmful & remorseless
• Half will act in violent or criminal ways

Antisocial Personality Disorder

• Used to be called psychopath or sociopath
• Has no conscience and shows no remorse
• Evidence often seen in childhood (conduct disorder)
• Shows absolutely no concern for the rights or feelings of other people
• Manipulative, can be charming, can be cruel & destructive
• Blaming the victim for his or her own stupidity
• Lack emotional intelligence
• Occurs in approximately 6 percent of men and 1 percent of women
• See NBC News video on psychopaths

Dr. Robert Hare describes his EEG studies and later SPECT (single photon emission computerized tomography) studies on language processing by psychopathic persons, and reflects on what these results reveal about psychopathy. (7:13)

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The Mind of the Psychopath

Click HERE to view or on the box to the right.

• Brain activity (EEG) is recorded while a person views strings of letters and presses a button whenever the letters form a word. The words are neutral (table, plate) or negative emotional (cancer, death) in content.

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• Hare found that in psychopathic persons, unlike in normal persons, the brain processes neutral and emotional words in the same way, demonstrating a lack of affect.

The Murderous Mind

PET scans illustrate reduced activation (less red and yellow) in a murderer's frontal cortex-a brain area that helps brake impulsive, aggressive behavior. (From Raine, 1999.) – Found 11% less frontal lobe tissue than normal

Arousal & Risk of Crime

• Levels of the stress hormone adrenaline were measured in two groups of 13-year - old Swedish boys.
• In both stressful and non-stressful situations, those who were later convicted of a crime (as 18- to 26- year - olds) showed relatively low arousal. (From Magnusson, 1990.)

Biological Causes of Antisocial Personality

• Two combined factors predicted antisocial problems:
1. Childhood maltreatment
2. A gene that altered neurotransmitter balance
• Either “bad” environment “turned on” these genes or the genes made these children more sensitive to the maltreatment.
• When shown emotional arousing pictures (see below), they display lower levels of heart rate and perspiration responses and less activity in emotional areas of their brain and impulse control frontal lobe areas.
• Hyper-reactive dopamine reward system that may lead them to be more impulsive to do something rewarding despite the consequences.

Gender Bias in Diagnosis

• In this study, case histories were more likely to be diagnosed as antisocial personality if they described a fictitious male patient
• If they described a fictitious female patient, they were more likely to be diagnosed as histrionic personality

Anxious or Fearful Personality Disorders�(Cluster C)

Avoidant Personality Disorder

• So sensitive about being rejected that personal relationships become difficult
• AVPD affects almost all social interactions in every aspect of daily life while Social Anxiety Disorder is to specific social experiences like giving a speech or using a public restroom.

Dependent Personality Disorder

• Behave in clingy, submissive ways and displays a strong need to have others take care of them

Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder �

• Unreasonable Perfectionism
• Need for personal control, order and organization
• Does not have full blown obsessions & compulsions
• See how this differs from OCD HERE

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