Aristotle's Psychological Theory

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1. When defining psychological disorder we have to question what exactly do we mean by psychological disorder. I considered the definition presented in an article by Psychology Today. They say the definition was released by DSM-5 it states, “A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbances in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental process underlying mental functioning”. According to class notes and discussions, abnormality, according to the consensus has not definition, but there are some clear elements. I think the main focus to acquire when attempting to comprehend a psychological disorder, is to consider …show more content…
Hippocrates early mental concepts proposed that mental disorders had natural causes, he categorized such disorders as mania, melancholia, or phrenitis associating such abnormalities with dreams and a person’s personality. In contrast Plato viewed the psychological phenomena as responses of the whole organism, he emphasized individual differences and sociocultural influences, and discussed hospital care. Rather than quickly diagnosing a person’s symptoms, by considering a person’s dreams to factor in with their psychological stability, Aristotle wrote descriptions of consciousness. The Egyptians proposed a wide range of therapeutic measures, while Galen’s provided that anatomy of the nervous system, and Romans focused on their medicine for comfort. The recent changes of abnormal behavior are the biological discoveries, the development of mental disorders using the classification system, the views of emergence of psychological causation, and the development of experimental psychological research. Consequently there is some controversy over the importance and relevancy of some historical …show more content…
The causes and risk factors for abnormal behavior are to consider the necessary, sufficient, and contributory causes, also known as an etiology which is the causal pattern of abnormal behavior. It is important to distinguish between distal causal factors and proximal (immediate) causal factors. Distal causal factors occur early in life or do not show effects for many years. It is difficult to specify which conditions are causes and which are effects because effects can serve as feedback that in turn influence the causes, influences can be a two-way occurrence, thus being bidirectional. Causal factors and proximal factors apply to the Diathesis-Stress Model because, diathesis is relatively distal, necessary or a contributory cause, that is not sufficient enough to cause a disorder. Stress is the response of individual to taxing demands. To be classified as a disorder, there has to be a combination of diathesis and stress identified. To put it briefly diathesis is a predisposition toward developing a disorder, but there is a need for more proximal undesirable to occur in combination with the diathesis to occur. Some bidirectional influences are genetic activity, neural activity, which in turn are influential to behavior, thus influencing the surrounding

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