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Lecture 5 - Personality Disorders (15:48 min)
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Psychological Issues, Psychology, Social Psychology, Mental Illness
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MS
Feb 14, 2017
Professor Steve Joordens is beyond awesome!! He made the Introduction to Psychology MOOC both interesting and fun. I would highly recommend this course to everyone. I give it a five-star rating!
DA
Mar 24, 2017
The teacher was amazing! I was so entertained with the material we were taught throughout the few months!\n\nDefinitely recommend this course so anyone with curiosity to why we do what we do!
De la lección
Mental Illness
This topic is Clinical Psychology and you'll learn both about various clinical disorders, and about the therapies commonly used to treat them.You'll be able to extend this knowledge to different disorders. Be careful to not start diagnosing all your friends or family (or yourself!)
Impartido por:
Steve Joordens
Professor
Okay, so now welcome to the last stop on our discussions of mental disorders.
we're going to talk about really a whole class of disorders but then zero in on
one one that you see depicted all the time in, in well almost every crime show
you watch. So, I think you'll find this interesting,
[INAUDIBLE] at it. Week 7, Lecture 5, Personality Disorders.
Usual disclaimer implied, alright. So, I've told you things like
schizophrenia, that there's actually you know, mult, multiple different categories
or kinds of schizophrenia and that's true.
It's especially true of personality disorders, and, and, these various
disorders are in fact in some cases, quite different from one and another.
And yet they're generally seen as being similar in the sense of, there's
something about somebody's abnormalities. Something about their personality that
either impairs their social and occupational functioning, or in some
cases affects those around them. But ultimately it's about their
interpersonal style, how they interact with others, that's the core of the
problem. Now, there's all of these, some of which
seem more or less problematic than others.
So, there's a lot of these odd eccentric one's which are you know, sometimes these
stereotypes you have of these weird people who like, for example, in a
schizoid or schizotypal situation. They don't, they don't like being around
other people. They prefer to be by themselves, which in
and of itself isn't necessarily a problem, but it is when it gets paired up
with some weird behavior. so that, you know, in a lot of these
cases I'm going to let you check those out on your own.
I'll give you a resource for doing that. but in a lot of these cases you describe
these people as more odd or eccentric, and so there's a whole class of
personality disorders for that. There's also, I'm going to skip over here
for a second. There's a whole class of personality
disorders that are more about, the person being somehow worried or like in, in the
case of things like of avoidant personality disorder.
They're actually kind of scared of, of certain people or certain situations.
Dependent personality disorder, they, they're, they're very clingy type of
people. Obsessive compulsive personality disorder
is similar to the obsessive compulsive disorder in general.
But it's more just about, that that's the dominant sort of aspect of their
personality, it's not really the behaviors that are getting in the way.
It's the fact that this person's always worrying about things, and always
thinking about things. and, and others just, you know, don't
enjoy being around the person, and sometimes they don't enjoy their style.
And then there's the more dramatic or emotional types now, I'm going to kind of
zero in because as always, we don't have much time, and I want to give you a
really interesting depic, depiction of personality disorders.
So, I'm going to zero in on this one, the one called Antisocial personality
disorder. You probably know it by a different name
but it's, it's literally the favorite form of criminal.
When they show you that cold, calculating criminal, often they're depicting
somebody with antisocial personality disorder.
So, let me get into that, let's just jump right there.
Just for fun, just to get you in the mindset, here's a problem for you to
think about. A woman while at the funeral of her
mother, met a guy who she did not know. She thought the guy was amazing, she
believed him to be her her dream guy so much so that she fell in love with him
right there. But never asked for his number and could
not find him thereafter. A few days later she killed her sister.
Why? Little bit of a thought problem.
Let me let you think about it for a second.
Anybody think they know the reason why? This problem is, is part of a video
you'll find on YouTube that's, that goes by the title, do you think like a
psychopath? because the notion is, if you ge, if you
can get the answer to this, you're on your way towards thinking in the way a
psychopath thinks. What's the answer?
Well, the answer's this, she wants to see the guy again.
and all she knows is that the guy was somehow connected to her mother, enough
so that when her mother died he came to the funeral.
So, maybe he's also somehow connected to her sister, connected to her family in a
way she doesn't know. So, if she simply goes and kills her
sister [LAUGH] for most of us that's not a simple act, but then she might get a
chance to meet this guy again and follow up and get to know him better.
Wow, okay, the idea is that sort of mindset, if you can imagine someone
thinking about that, what are you imagining?
Well, you're imagining this calculating nature mixed with a complete divorcing of
feelings for things horrific, like killing her sister.
If that just becomes a means to an end, and she can't really think about, you
know, the horrificness of that well that's the kind of thinking expressed
here. And in fact if we talk about psychopaths
so, you think of psychopaths. I think that's what they've talked about
in TV shows, it's a, its sort of part of, something we generally class under anti
social personality disorder. but depending on the person it could be
more or less extreme. So, the all out psychopaths are more
extreme and in terms of psychopaths, these are the kinds of traits they show,
glutinous and superficial charms. When we first meet psychopaths, we tend
to like them. Kay?
They're outgoing, they have a lot of charm, they're seemingly happy, they're
confident. their not worried about anything,
everything is going to be good, we'll make it good.
Grandiosity, they're big. Okay?
They think big they live big they seem like passionate people.
Pathological lying, this is normally where things start to go awry, you meet
one of these psychopaths you like them a lot, you start hanging around with them,
they're telling you all these amazing things.
And then over time you start to realize the things they're telling you are not
true, they don't add up. and in fact, typically if you challenge a
psychopath about that and if you really catch them in a lie, where most of us
might go, I'm really sorry, I feel bad. A psychopath would typically go, oh yeah,
I was just funny with you, man I was just trying to see how far I could push you
but whatever, no big deal. So, they'll blow off getting caught in
lies, they don't seem to be too upset by it.
they have this sort of cunning and manipulative way, they're always trying
to make something happen. They don't seem to have this remorse or
guilt. Shallow affect they're, they're not
emotionally responsive, they're just always kind of on, as it were.
this is the real, the callousness and the lack of empathy.
If they want something and getting that thing means harming others, they seem to
be able to do that without ever putting themselves in that other person's
position. So, they're manipulative and yet they,
they're not caring. They don't share that feeling.
They don't share empathy. And they never accept responsibility for,
bad things. Okay?
So, bad things happen, it's always somebody else's fault, it's always some
external cause for bad things. So, you know, these psychopaths are
obviously can be very problematic. Now there's, there's sort of a lower
level of the this that we think of as secondary psychopathy or antisocial
behavior. Now, sometimes people will show
combinations of these but you think of these a little bit, this is a less
extreme. Somebody who's impulsive, irresponsible,
proneness to boredom, they need to be stimulated somehow.
They don't ever seem to have any realistic goals, they may have some big
goals, but nothing realistic. They seem to live off of others,
parasitic lifestyle. Poor behavioral control, they do whatever
they feel like at any time. that tends to cause behavioral problems,
juvenile delinquency. yeah, they get conditional releases and
then they screw it up again and then they get right back in there.
So, if you kind of think of this, you can see why the combination of these things
can make somebody pretty criminal or drawn to criminal elements.
a few other things that tend to be common so, there's some that have more of this
and there's some that have more of this. But there, but just about all of them
have this too, which is a very impersonal sex life, having trouble with
relationships in general. In fact, sometimes, when they do have
successful relationships, it's with other psychopaths, which is kind of scary.
many short term marriages, criminal versatility, [LAUGH] that's a nice way of
saying it, it means they're do all sorts of criminal deeds, okay?
So, it, they're really freed up, you know, for most of us, we don't do
criminal acts because we're either thinking about how this will impact our
life, which they don't seem to worry about too much.
Or we think about how this will impact others.
And they don't seem to worry about that too much either.
and so they're very prone to do criminal things, especially if there's nice short
term gains ahead of it, that's what they seem to be drawn by.
So, first of all, they, they seem to have, from a scientific perspective, from
a psychological perspective, these psychopaths are very interesting in terms
of the sort of dissociation may show. They seem to have what we've called,
Theory of Mind. Remember we had a whole lecture on that,
that if, if we have a situation where we have Sally and Anne.
Sally puts a ball in the basket, which Anne sees, Sally goes away.
Anne then moves the ball to her box, and then if we ask somebody who's just seen
this play out, we said, where will Sally look for the ball?
Well, the right answer is that Sally will look in her basket, because that's where
she put it and she wasn't there when Ann moved it.
and again, at a certain point, children can figure this out, they can see the
world through Sally's eyes. Psychopaths can surely do that.
With, they're so manipulative, they can you know, surely see, and, and figure out
what other people know. in fact, sometimes when we talk about
theory of mind, we talk about this recursive nature where you know, Jack is
thinking about something, Jill might be thinking about what Jack's thinking
about. You can look at somebody and you could
kind of think about what you think they're thinking about.
in fact, Jack could think about what Jill thinks he's thinking about.
This recursive nature, we have this ability to get inside the minds of
others. And psychopaths have this ability.
But for most of us, when we get inside their mind, we get inside their emotional
state too. And so when we see it from their
perspective, we feel it from their perspective.
Psychopaths seem to be able to plan and manipulate in a way that says, they
certainly understand how others see the world, but they don't seem to care about
the feelings they hurt. So, they have theory of mind but not
empathy, which is very interesting because, usually in psychology, we see
these two things as, as you know, going hand in glove.
So, a psychopath can suggest that's not necessarily the case.
Alright. Trying to understand what causes
psychopathy, it's is tricky of course because the psychopath themselves does
not think there's anything wrong with them.
They kind of almost feel like they're better than everybody else, smarter than
everybody else, somehow more insulated, tougher, stronger.
so they don't really see they have a problem, but clearly it causes a problem
for others. So, when we've tried to figure out well
what is it that's going on? There have been some interesting
experiments and I'm going to tell you about one.
This experiment simply asks people to make decisions and figure stuff out but
they were punished for making wrong decisions.
And the question was how much would that punishment help them learn right, okay?
When the punishment was electric shock, that did not seem to help psychopaths
learn, okay? When they did something wrong and they
got a shock, it didn't seem like they worried about doing it wrong again.
They didn't try extra hard to avoid the shock.
in fact, you know, it really just didn't seem to help them at all.
But, if you gave them a stack of money, and you took money away every time they
were wrong, then it mattered. Then psychopaths learned, losing money
was much more salient to them than pain, than physical pain.
In fact, one of the notions is that psychopaths really have some sort of
blocked sense of pain, that they don't, that they themselves don't feel negative
states. And perhaps that's why they can't
understand how others are feeling them, or, or at least they can't share those
feelings. They might understand it, they might use
it and manipulate it, but they don't actually feel the pain of others, perhaps
they don't actually feel much pain themselves.
Kind of fascinating. but again just early, early days
[INAUDIBLE] understanding. Alright, so a lot to talk about with,
with psycho, psychopathy and with personality disorders in general, I've
only been able to give you a taste. but hopefully you'll see that it's a,
it's a nice, nice, it's an interesting different kind of disorder, one in which
the person who suffers from it, is quite happy with it.
And the rest of the world we're the ones that are worried about the psychopaths.
so that makes it for a very, different kind of disorder, how do you treat
somebody who doesn't think their isn't anything wrong with them?.
Alright. Here's some interesting resources for
you. There's a gentleman who has a book
called, How to Spot a Psychopath. And this is him giving a TED talk related
to his book. This is a more general discussion of
personality disorders because as I told you at the beginning there's actually,
you know, a bunch of different personality disorders that are quite
different. and then here's a whole YouTube channel,
that mentions various personality disorders.
So, if you're interested in the other ones, please check those out to get a
much more rounded picture than I was able to give you in this course.
as far as readings, again, here's some more on personality disorders in general,
to give that well rounded notion. And now here's a little discussion on
psychopaths versus sociopaths, getting into the fine grain difference between
these slightly different kinds of, of similar disorders.
So, I thought I'd throw that at you so, you kind of think about some of those
issues that differentiate on a, on a much more smaller scale.
Alright so, you know, we've got anxiety disorders, we have personality disorders,
we have emotional disorders, we have schizophrenia and we have something else
that I forgot about. But, at any [INAUDIBLE] , lots of
different disorder styles lots of [INAUDIBLE] ways in which people can show
disorder behavior. and so now we're going to [UNKNOWN] into
the question of well, what do you, how do you help these people?
How therapeutically can we intervene in a way that makes either their lives better,
or the lives around them better? That's what we'll talk about in the last
three lectures this week. See you there.
Have a great day. Bye bye.
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