Personality Disorders

Personality Disorders

Inflexible, maladaptive pattern of thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and interpersonal functioning that are stable over time and across situations, and deviate from the expectations of the individual’s culture

Personality Disorders• Personality disorders are evident in

up to 15 percent of the general population

• 10 personality disorders divided into 3 clusters:

– Related to anxiety

– With odd and eccentric behaviors

– With dramatic or impulsive behaviors

Personality Disorders Related to Anxiety

Avoidant Personality Disorder

• So sensitive about being rejected that personal relationships become difficult

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

Personality Disorders with Odd or Eccentric

Behaviors

Paranoid Personality Disorder• Pervasive mistrust and suspiciousness of others are the

main characteristic– Distrustful even of close family and friends– Reluctant to form close relationships– Tend to blame others for their own shortcomings– Pathological jealousy in intimate relationships – Inappropriate outbursts of anger

• About 3 percent of the general population display this disorder, which occurs more frequently in men

• Not much research on what causes this disorder; however, it tends to co-occur with schizotypal and avoidant personality disorders

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)

• Displays odd speech, emotional behaviors, mannerisms and appearance

• Struggle with relationships

Personality Disorders with Dramatic or

Impulsive Behaviors

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

• Characterized by instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and emotions, and marked impulsivity & self-destructive behaviors

• Intense fear of abandonment and emptiness

• Possible history of childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse

• 75% of diagnosed cases are women

Antisocial Personality Disorder

• Used to be called psychopath or sociopath• 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 and destructive• Blaming the victim for his or her own stupidity • Has no conscience and shows no remorse • Occurs in approximately 6 percent of men and

1 percent of women • See NBC News video on psychopaths

The Mind of the Psychopath

• Psychopathy, or antisocial personality disorder, is characterized by a lack of conscience for wrongdoing. The psychopathic person (usually male) may be overtly aggressive and violent or a charming con artist; he shows little remorse for wrongdoing, even against friends and family.

• Dr. Robert Hare, a leading researcher in the field of psychopathy, developed a test called the lexical decision paradigm. 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.

• 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.

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)

The Mind of the Psychopath

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

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.)

The Mind of the Psychopath: Questions

1. Summarize the differences in results for normal and psychopathic subjects in the SPECT study and the conclusions drawn by Hare.

2. What other findings does Hare describe on the information-processing capabilities of psychopathic persons?

3. What do these studies reveal about the causes of psychopathy?

Cold - Blooded Arousability & Risk of Crime

•Levels of the stress hormone adrenaline were measured in two groups of 13-year - old Swedish boys.

•In both stressful and nonstressful situations, those who were later convicted of a crime (as 18- to 26- year - olds) showed relatively low arousal. (From Magnusson, 1990.)

Bio psycho social roots of crime

Danish male babies whose backgrounds were marked both by obstetrical complications and social stresses associated with poverty were twice as likely to be criminal offenders by ages 20 to 22 as those in either the biological or social risk groups. (From Raine & others, 1996.)

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 and as histrionic personality if they described a fictitious female patient, regardless of which disorder the case history was designed to portray.