Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. Define abnormal psychology.
Answer: Abnormal psychology is the area of psychology focused on maladaptive behaviour: its causes, consequences and treatment.
Q. What are the ‘four Ds’ used to describe abnormal behaviour?
Answer: Deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger.
Q. Name the two organisations, and their manuals, used to classify psychological disorders.
Answer: The American Psychiatric Association (DSM-5) and the World Health Organisation (ICD-10).
Q. What is a delusion?
Answer: A delusion is a false belief that is firmly held on inadequate grounds; it is not affected by rational argument and has no basis in reality.
Q. What is the strongest risk factor for suicide, according to this chapter?
Answer: A previous suicide attempt is the strongest risk factor.
Q. Name the three main types of phobia.
Answer: Specific phobia, social anxiety disorder (social phobia) and agoraphobia.
Q. What is meant by ‘avolition’?
Answer: Avolition is apathy and an inability to start or complete a course of action, seen as a negative symptom of schizophrenia.
Q. About what percentage of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder also have intellectual disabilities?
Answer: About 70 per cent.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Distinguish between obsessions and compulsions.
Answer: An obsession is the inability to stop thinking about a particular idea or topic, which the person often finds unpleasant or shameful. A compulsion is the need to perform certain behaviours over and over, such as counting, ordering, checking, touching or washing.
Q. What is meant by ‘maladaptive behaviour’? Give one example from the chapter.
Answer: Maladaptive behaviour is behaviour that cannot be modified according to the needs of a situation. Example: a student who stays silent in class despite having questions in mind, which the chapter treats as a case of maladaptive, conforming behaviour.
Q. Name the three components of the diathesis-stress model.
Answer: Diathesis (a biological predisposition, possibly inherited), vulnerability (the diathesis puts the person ‘at risk’), and pathogenic stressors (stress factors that can trigger the disorder in an at-risk person).
Q. What is dissociative fugue?
Answer: Dissociative fugue is a part of dissociative amnesia involving unexpected travel away from home and workplace, the assumption of a new identity, and inability to recall the previous identity. It usually ends when the person ‘wakes up’ with no memory of the fugue period, and is often linked to overwhelming stress.
Q. Distinguish between somatic symptom disorder and illness anxiety disorder.
Answer: In somatic symptom disorder, the person’s concern is expressed mainly as physical complaints. In illness anxiety disorder, the anxiety about developing a serious illness is itself the main concern.
Q. What are the two main features of ADHD?
Answer: Inattention (difficulty sustaining mental effort, following instructions, easily distracted) and hyperactivity-impulsivity (constant motion, inability to wait turns or control immediate reactions).
Q. Name the four types of aggression described under Conduct Disorder.
Answer: Verbal aggression (name-calling, swearing), physical aggression (hitting, fighting), hostile aggression (directed at inflicting injury) and proactive aggression (dominating/bullying without provocation).
Q. What is meant by an ‘enmeshed’ family structure?
Answer: An enmeshed family is one in which members are overinvolved in each other’s activities, thoughts and feelings, making it difficult for children from such families to become independent in life.
Q. What is meant by ‘labelling’ in the socio-cultural explanation of abnormal behaviour?
Answer: Socio-cultural theorists hold that when people break social norms, they are labelled ‘deviant’ or ‘mentally ill’. Such labels tend to stick, so the person is viewed as ‘crazy’, gradually accepts the sick role, and functions in a disturbed manner.
Q. Name the three types of eating disorders discussed in this chapter.
Answer: Anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating.
3 4-Mark Questions
Q. Explain the four Ds used to define abnormal behaviour, with an example of each.
Answer: The four Ds are: (i) Deviance: different, extreme or bizarre behaviour, e.g. hearing voices no one else hears. (ii) Distress: unpleasant, upsetting feelings for the person or others, e.g. the intense fear in a panic attack. (iii) Dysfunction: interference with daily functioning, e.g. a person with agoraphobia unable to leave home to work. (iv) Danger: possible harm to self or others, e.g. suicidal thoughts in major depressive disorder.
Q. Describe the supernatural, biological and psychological perspectives on abnormal behaviour in the history of Western civilisation.
Answer: The supernatural perspective held that abnormal behaviour was caused by evil spirits or the devil, treated by exorcism, with the shaman (ojha) mediating with spirits. The biological/organic perspective held that people behave strangely because their bodies and brains are not working properly; Galen’s four humours, whose imbalance was believed to cause disorders, belong to this line of thought. Hippocrates, Socrates and especially Plato developed the organismic approach, which saw disturbed behaviour as arising out of conflicts between emotion and reason. The psychological perspective, developed through figures like St. Augustine and Johann Weyer, held that psychological conflict and disturbed relationships cause abnormal behaviour. All three perspectives recur through history and have now converged into the modern interactional, or bio-psycho-social, approach.
Q. Explain the diathesis-stress model of abnormal behaviour.
Answer: The diathesis-stress model is one of the most widely accepted explanations of abnormal behaviour. It has three components: a diathesis, or biological predisposition to a disorder, which may be inherited; the vulnerability this diathesis creates, making the person ‘at risk’ or ‘predisposed’; and the presence of pathogenic stressors, factors that can trigger psychopathology. If an ‘at risk’ person is exposed to such stressors, the predisposition may evolve into an actual disorder. This model has been applied to anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.
Q. Describe the characteristics of children with hyperactivity (ADHD).
Answer: Children with ADHD show two main clusters of symptoms. Inattentive children find it hard to sustain mental effort, keep their mind on one thing, or follow instructions; common complaints are not listening, being disorganised, easily distracted, forgetful, and quick to lose interest. Hyperactive-impulsive children are in constant motion: they fidget, squirm, climb and run around aimlessly, cannot wait their turn, act before thinking, and talk incessantly; parents and teachers describe them as ‘driven by a motor’.
Q. What are the consequences of alcohol and substance addiction?
Answer: Alcohol abuse leads the body to build tolerance, needing more alcohol for the same effect, and produces withdrawal symptoms on stopping. It destroys families, social relationships and careers, and intoxicated drivers cause many road accidents; children of people with alcohol-use disorder show higher rates of anxiety, depression, phobias and substance-related disorders. Heroin abuse similarly leads to dependence and tolerance, with overdose (which slows the brain’s respiratory centres) as its most direct, sometimes fatal, danger. Regular cocaine use causes poor social and occupational functioning, problems in short-term memory and attention, and withdrawal effects like depression, fatigue and anxiety when stopped.
Q. Can a distorted body image lead to eating disorders? Classify the various forms of eating disorders.
Answer: Yes. In anorexia nervosa, a distorted body image makes the person see themself as overweight even when they are not, leading to refusal to eat, compulsive exercise, and severe weight loss. The chapter classifies feeding and eating disorders into three forms: anorexia nervosa (as above); bulimia nervosa, where the person eats excessively and then purges through vomiting, laxatives or diuretics; and binge eating, frequent episodes of out-of-control eating, sometimes even without hunger.
Q. Distinguish between the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia, with examples.
Answer: Positive symptoms are pathological excesses or ‘bizarre additions’ to behaviour: delusions (e.g. of persecution or grandeur), hallucinations (most commonly auditory), disorganised thinking/speech, and inappropriate affect. Negative symptoms are pathological deficits: alogia (poverty of speech), blunted or flat affect (reduced or absent emotion), and avolition (apathy, inability to start or complete tasks, social withdrawal). A third category, psychomotor symptoms, can reach the extreme form of catatonia.
Q. Can a long-standing pattern of deviant behaviour be considered abnormal? Discuss using the two views of abnormality.
Answer: Under the social-norms view, a long-standing pattern that departs markedly from a society’s accepted conduct would be called abnormal, since this view defines abnormality purely as deviation from social norms. Under the maladaptive-behaviour view, however, the same pattern is abnormal only if it actually interferes with the individual’s or group’s well-being, growth and functioning, whatever society thinks of it, and, notably, this view also allows even conforming behaviour to be called abnormal if it is maladaptive. So a long-standing deviant pattern can be judged abnormal, but the two views give different reasons: one looks at social disapproval, the other at whether the behaviour actually harms functioning and well-being.
Q. What are phobias? If someone had an intense fear of snakes, could this be a result of faulty learning? Analyse.
Answer: Phobias are irrational fears related to specific objects, people or situations, grouped into specific phobia, social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. The behavioural model states that both normal and abnormal behaviours, including fears, are learned through classical conditioning, operant conditioning or social learning, and that what has been learned can also be unlearned. An intense fear of snakes could plausibly develop through classical conditioning, if a frightening experience became associated with snakes, or through social learning, by observing a parent’s fear reaction. Since the behavioural model holds that learned fears can be unlearned, this would also mean the phobia is treatable through the same learning principles that created it.
4 6-Mark Questions
Q. ‘Physicians make a diagnosis looking at a person’s physical symptoms.’ How are psychological disorders diagnosed?
Answer: Mental health professionals rely on standard classification systems: the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5, which presents discrete clinical criteria for the presence or absence of a disorder, and the World Health Organisation’s ICD-10, which describes each disorder’s clinical features, associated symptoms and diagnostic guidelines. A diagnosis is reached by matching the person’s symptoms against these criteria. A classification also lets psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers communicate about disorders and helps in understanding their causes.
Q. What do you understand by the term ‘dissociation’? Discuss its various forms.
Answer: Dissociation is the severance of connections between ideas and emotions, involving feelings of unreality, estrangement, depersonalisation, and sometimes a loss or shift of identity. A sudden, temporary alteration of consciousness that blots out painful experiences is a defining characteristic of the dissociative disorders. Its forms are: dissociative amnesia, extensive but selective memory loss with no known organic cause (a part of this is dissociative fugue, involving unexpected travel, a new identity, and inability to recall the old one); dissociative identity disorder (often called multiple personality), the most dramatic dissociative disorder, usually linked to childhood trauma, where the person has two or more alternate personalities; and depersonalisation/derealisation disorder, a dreamlike state where the person feels separated from both self and reality.
Q. Anxiety has been called the ‘butterflies in the stomach feeling’. At what stage does anxiety become a disorder? Discuss its types.
Answer: Anxiety is a diffuse, vague, unpleasant feeling of fear and apprehension that everyone experiences, for instance before an exam; in normal amounts it even motivates good performance. It becomes a disorder when it reaches a high level that is distressing and interferes with effective functioning, which is when it is diagnosed as an anxiety disorder, the most common category of psychological disorders. Its types include: generalised anxiety disorder (prolonged, unexplained, intense fears not tied to any object, with hypervigilance and motor tension); panic disorder (recurrent, unpredictable attacks of intense terror with physical symptoms like breathlessness and palpitations); phobias, of three kinds, specific phobia, social anxiety disorder and agoraphobia; and separation anxiety disorder, extreme distress on separation from an attachment figure beyond what is developmentally appropriate.
5 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark Name the anxiety disorder Deb’s repeated attacks best illustrate.
Answer: Panic disorder.
(B) 2 marks List three clinical features of a panic attack mentioned in the chapter that match Deb’s experience.
Answer: Palpitations (his heart beating rapidly), shortness of breath, and the fear of going crazy or dying (Deb ‘started feeling that he had gone crazy and would die’). The chapter’s panic-attack list also includes dizziness, trembling, choking, nausea, and chest pain or discomfort.
(C) 3 marks Deb eventually stops leaving his house. Which other anxiety disorder does this avoidance resemble, and why?
Answer: It resembles agoraphobia, the fear of entering unfamiliar situations that leaves many people afraid to leave home at all, since Deb’s avoidance of driving has generalised into avoiding leaving the house altogether, severely limiting his normal activities.