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Abnormal Psychology: Essentials, 1st Canadian Edition

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This first Canadian edition of Essentials of Abnormal Psychology covers the terrain one might expect of an abnormal psychology textbook. This includes chapters on historical context, approaches to psychopathology, clinical assessment, diagnosis and research methods, anxiety disorders, somatoform and dissociative disorders, mood disorders and suicide, physical disorders and health psychology, eating and sleep disorders, sexual and gender identity disorders, substance-related disorders, personality disorders, schizophrenia and other related disorders, developmental and cognitive disorders, and finally, legal and ethical issues as related to mental health. Although the book initially may look rather dense (it is not), there are numerous organisational aids to facilitate learning. These include concept checks (answers included) embedded throughout the chapters, multiple-choice quizzes, and a visual "Cole's Notes" summary of the causes, symptoms, and treatments for the different diagnoses. Students should find the accompanying CD with brief clips of therapists interviewing clients with various mental disorders intriguing and thought-provoking. Instructors may appreciate that each clip has an associated question (e.g., "What symptoms of depression are evident?").
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... Specifically, research with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) patients shows the presence of hippocampal atrophy, which is thought to be due to the excessive release of glucocorticoids. This suggests that impaired functioning of the hippocampus may contribute to the emotional dysfunction seen in PTSD [14]. The hypothalamus allows for the quick processing of emotional information [15]. ...
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The perception of emotions and the recognition of facial expressions play a critical role in social interaction between humans. Faces communicate a great deal of information, including dynamic features, such as an individual’s internal emotional state, and static features, such as a person’s identity. Two major views have evolved from the investigation of how facial expressions are perceived and processed, the discrete category view and the dimensional theory. According to the discrete category view, basic facial expressions convey discrete and specific emotions: anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness. Conversely, the dimensional view suggests that the mental representation of emotional space consists of continuous underlying dimensions in which similar emotions are clustered together while different ones are far apart. While both theories postulate that affective information is resistant to contextual influences, research on this topic has provided reasons to believe that the relationship between facial expressions and their contexts may play an important role in determining the perceived emotion. Similarly, studies looking at the right hemisphere and the fusiform face area (FFA) have led researches to suggest that factors other than the presence of faces, such as experience and training, can also activate the FFA. This review looks at the role of facial expressions in everyday life and the two opposing theories on how facial expressions are perceived and processed in the brain. Specifically, the malleability of emotion perception and face recognition and the brain regions that involved in emotion are explored.
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