Tutto il necessario per l'esame "Abilità di Inglese scientifico" (proff. Galli, Coles, Barzotti), a.a. 2014-2015.

Mass behaviour

Social psychology

Social psychology is concerned with how people relate in groups and how they are affected by their environments. It finds applications in government planning, where it helps to draw up effective policies, and in the industry, mainly in advertising.

Psychology: 5 branches

Industrial psychology

Industrial psychology focuses on motivation at work, working productively, establishing effective teams, and selecting the best employees.

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychology examines the structure of the brain and the effect that stimuli may have on the nervous system and behavior. It is useful in both medicine and the commercial world.

Developmental psychology

Developmental psychology studies the development and maturation of people's brains throughout their lifetime. It focuses on understanding the world that children create.

Educational psychology

Educational psychology is a subfield that deals with learning. There is a relationship between the evolution of cognitive functions and the learning process.

Personality psychology

Personality psychology analyzes the behavior of people and classifies them into personality types. It finds applications in selecting employees, psychotherapy, and a forensic context, such as profiling.

Clinical psychology

Clinical psychology is focused on the diagnosis and treatment of people with behavioral problems and mental disorders, operating in hospitals or private clinics.

Counseling

Counseling helps healthy people manage unusually stressful situations (such as divorce) and is also available for students.

Lecture 1

Lecture 1.1 – Prof. Bloom introduces the psychology course

The main topic of the course is us! How does the human mind work? How do we think? What makes us who we are? Professor Bloom approaches these questions from a range of directions, mainly five: in a social way, a neuroscientific way (studying the mind by looking at the brain), a developmental way (to see how people grow and learn), in a cognitive way (referring to a sort of computational approach to the mind, as a computer), and in a clinical way.

The discipline of psychology spills over into issues of how the mind has evolved, covering areas such as philosophy, literature, and theology. Professor Bloom shows an image of Terry Schiavo’s brain and says he will start the course talking about the brain, in particular about the physical nature of mental life.

Lecture 1.2 – Developmental psychology

Professor Bloom has been studying child development and is interested in several questions: how do we come to have certain knowledge, such as speaking and understanding English or understanding how people behave? How much of it is innate or the product of culture and schooling? To what extent is it possible to know and describe, since childhood, how someone will grow and what they will become?

This is possible for the poet W. Wordsworth, who wrote “the child is father to the man,” meaning that in every child lies the adult they will become. What makes us the way we are? We have different tastes and IQs, and we may be aggressive or shy: why are we different? One common theory, though controversial, is that we are shaped by our parents.

Questions Professor Bloom will deal with include: “What makes someone or something attractive, and how much of attractiveness is linked to sex?” He will also discuss morality, evil and good, considering the dilemma of nature versus nurture and “what would we do in such situations?” Professor Bloom will not fail to discuss mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, and will try to answer the question of their high frequency and the best ways to help sufferers.

Lecture 1.3 – Less common mental disorders

Professor Bloom has a particular interest in less common mental disorders, as examining extreme cases can help us better understand normal life. To explain how the brain can give rise to the mind, he starts with the case of Phineas Gage, a man from the last century who was hit by a metal pipe that pierced his head and damaged his sense of morality. Gage lost control: he couldn’t keep a job, remain faithful to his wife, cursed everyone, got into brawls, and often got drunk.

Professor Bloom is also interested in multiple personality disorder, which raises the question of what constitutes a self, in Capgras syndrome, which leads sufferers to believe their loved ones have been replaced by aliens or CIA agents, and in Cotard’s syndrome, characterized by the irrational certainty of being dead. The striking thing is that these syndromes are located at a pinpoint level in certain parts of the brain.

Lecture 18 – Prof. Nolen-Hoeksema talks about mood disorders

Slide presentation on mood disorders

Professor Nolen-Hoeksema covers mood disorders, analyzing their causes and focusing on sex differences. The fundamental question in clinical psychology is “What is abnormality?” Mental health cannot be confirmed through biological tests but through behavioral criteria, which are subjectively judged. Unfortunately, these judgments can be influenced by factors such as:

• Social norms (e.g., wearing a veil in a Muslim versus a non-Muslim culture)
• Characteristics of the individual, such as gender (e.g., a man crying is less usual than a woman)
• The context (e.g., paranoia in Baghdad versus Urbino)

Moreover, heuristics are used to label phenomena as normal or abnormal, such as “the three Ds”:

• Distress: to the self (e.g., depression) or to others (e.g., antisocial personality disorder)
• Dysfunction: behaviors that prevent a person from functioning in daily life (e.g., people with depression often can’t get up in the morning, go to work, or attend school, leading to social isolation)
• Deviance: behaviors or feelings that are unusual, influenced by cultural differences and social norms

The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), since the 1980s, reports more objective criteria for diagnosing mental disorders and provides a list of symptoms built around the three Ds. Regarding mood disorders, the DSM states that depression is more common among women (25%) than men (13%) and often begins during college years. The DSM distinguishes between:

• Unipolar depression disorders: Major depression, with criteria including sadness or anhedonia plus four of the following symptoms: significant weight loss or gain, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor retardation or agitation (slow speech, more prone to accidents), fatigue, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, indecisiveness and inability to concentrate (clouded thoughts), suicidal ideas or behaviors (lasting for almost two weeks).
• Bipolar depression disorders: The person cycles between depression and mania/hypomania. Criteria for diagnosing a manic episode include abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood for at least one week, plus three of the following symptoms: inflated self-esteem or grandiosity, decreased need for sleep, more talkative, flight of ideas, distractibility, increased goal-directed activities or agitation (the person has grand and often irrational schemes to pursue), excessive involvement in pleasurable but dangerous activities (e.g., sex, drugs, gambling).

Hypomania is a milder version of mania with the same symptoms. Bipolar individuals often seek help due to the negative consequences of “dangerous activities” or because they know they will plunge into depression.

It is crucial to understand the continuum between healthy and psychopathology. A depressed person isn’t someone who had a bad day and feels down but someone who is completely non-functional and vegetative, living as a “walking wounded.” There is no clear line between normality and abnormality, and moderate forms of depression can worsen into more serious forms if left untreated. Depressed individuals often feel ashamed about seeking treatment, enduring their condition for years until they fall apart.

In bipolar disorder, there is also a safe side of the continuum, where individuals cycle between low levels of mania and depression. Jamison, in a book from ’96, provides biographies of authors, poets, and musicians like Schumann, arguing that they had mild bipolar disorder and that some people (such as CEOs) experience a low level of chronic mania they can control and channel productively.

Theories and treatments

There are three main theories and treatments:

Biological

Mood disorders have a genetic component. Monozygotic twins share a mood disorder in 60% of cases, compared to 12% for fraternal twins and 2% for second-degree relatives. Early-onset depression is more likely to have genetic components than that triggered by life events. Caspi and colleagues (2003) revealed that a certain polymorphism on serotonin transporters is a genetic vulnerability for developing depression if the person experienced childhood abuse.

Areas involved in mood disorders include:

• Prefrontal cortex (less activity)
• Amygdala (overactive processing of emotional information)
• Hippocampal shrinkage (concentration)
• Anterior cingulate (emotional dysregulation)

Drugs to treat mood disorders include:

• Tricyclic antidepressants (60% response rate, but with side effects)
• SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (e.g., Prozac, with fewer side effects)
• Lithium (for bipolar disorder, with serious side effects)
• Antipsychotic drugs (for those who have lost touch with reality)

Severely depressed individuals may receive Electroconvulsive Therapy, which involves 6-12 sessions. Patients are anesthetized and given muscle relaxants, with a high response rate but also a high relapse rate. Newer biological treatments include rTMS, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation on specific brain structures to stimulate activity (especially on the Vagus Nerve).

Cognitive

Depressed individuals exhibit a “Negative Cognitive Triangle,” as described by Beck, encompassing a negative view of the self, the world, and the future, influencing their behaviors. There are typical cognitive biases, such as all-or-nothing thinking, emotional reasoning, and personalization and causal attributions for negative events being internal (blamed on oneself), stable, and global. Alloy and colleagues in ’99 studied cognitive theories on 240 patients with major depressive disorder. For four months, one group received Paxil, an SSRI medication, another received CBT, and the last a placebo. Results showed that after 12 weeks, 60% of both groups were free from depression. In the subsequent 12 months, patients who stopped Paxil relapsed in 80% of cases, those who stayed on Paxil alone relapsed in 50% of cases, and those who had CBT relapsed in 35% of cases.

Interpersonal

Interpersonal therapy is less structured than CBT. It explores patterns of relationships and roots in childhood, helping people understand connections between interpersonal problems and upbringing.