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What Is Abnormal Psychology: Scope, Criteria, and Deviant Behavior
Abnormal Psychology · Chapter 1: Foundations of Abnormal PsychologySection 1.1 · lesson 1 of 9713 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
What the field studies, and why no single test for abnormality survives inspection.
- Define abnormal psychology and separate it from psychopathology
- Distinguish the field from the professions that draw on it
- Apply the four D's and defend the judgment reached
- Explain how culture, context and time move the answer
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,838 words). Read along, or search it.
Foundations of Abnormal Psychology
What Is Abnormal Psychology: Scope, Criteria, and Deviant Behavior
Here is a question that sounds simple, and turns out not to be. What makes a pattern of thought or behavior abnormal? Most first answers collapse within a sentence of being tested. This section takes the question seriously, and gives it a structure. We start with what the field studies, and what it does not. Then we watch three obvious definitions fail, one after another. After that come the four criteria the field uses instead. Deviance. Distress. Dysfunction. Danger. None of them works alone. That is exactly why there are four. And every one of them changes its answer with culture, context, and time.
The Field
A Body of Knowledge, Not a Profession
Abnormal psychology is the scientific study of patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. Specifically, patterns that cause distress, or interfere with the ability to function. It also covers how those patterns get described, explained, classified, and treated. Psychopathology names the patterns themselves, and the study of their features and causes. The two words are often used interchangeably. The difference is where the emphasis falls. Treatment is only one of the questions it asks. This is a research field first, and a helping profession second. Clinical psychology applies that science to assessment, formulation, and treatment. Counseling psychology overlaps in method, but leans toward adjustment, transitions, and strengths. Psychiatry is a medical specialty, so psychiatrists can prescribe and manage physical care. All three are things a person does with clients. The field is the knowledge behind them. One last thing. This material is educational, and is not a basis for diagnosis.
The Hard Word
Three Obvious Definitions That Fail
Every definition so far used the word abnormal without explaining it. That is where the real difficulty sits. Watch three obvious answers fail. First answer. Abnormal means rare. This is called statistical infrequency, and it fails in both directions at once. Exceptional mathematical talent is rare. So is an unusually generous temperament. Both are rare, and rarity alone tells you nothing about whether something is a problem. It also misses conditions that plainly are disordered, but common. A condition does not become healthy by being widespread. Second answer. Abnormal means odd, or unconventional. Same defect, plus one more. It tracks taste. Dress, diet, religious practice, sleep schedule, career choice. Third answer, and the most dangerous. Abnormal means unwanted. This is the one that has actually been used, on behavior that inconvenienced authority. The record includes categories later removed, once it was clear they encoded disapproval.
The Four D's
Four Imperfect Criteria, Applied Together
So no single criterion survives inspection. The field uses several together instead. They are called the four D's. Deviance. Distress. Dysfunction. Danger. Four imperfect criteria, applied jointly, because each one catches cases the others miss. And each fails in a different place, so the failures do not line up. Deviance asks whether the behavior departs from the norms of the setting. Distress asks what the person themselves reports about their own suffering. Dysfunction asks whether daily life has become harder to carry out. Danger asks about risk of harm, to the person or to anyone else. Here is where students most often go wrong. This is not a checklist. No fixed number has to be present. They are four questions, weighed together. A presentation that satisfies only one has not been established as anything at all.
Deviance
The First Thing Anyone Notices
Take deviance first. It means departure from the norms that govern a given setting. Social, cultural, or situational norms. And no implication of moral fault. A norm is a shared, largely unspoken standard for behavior in a particular context. Norms are remarkably local. Eye contact, personal space, emotion shown at a funeral. Deviance earns its place because it is usually what gets noticed first. Families rarely say that someone's functioning has declined. They say the person is not themselves. That is a deviance judgment, and it is frequently the entry point to care. Now the cost. The criterion measures conformity, and conformity is not health. Applied alone, it pathologizes minority practice, dissent, and cultural difference. It also excuses harmful behavior, when that behavior happens to be widespread. Here is the historical correction. Same-sex attraction was once listed as a disorder. It was removed in nineteen seventy-three, on the grounds that the listing reflected social norms.
Distress
Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient
Distress is the subjective suffering a person reports. Anxiety, sadness, shame, fear, or a diffuse sense that something is wrong. It is why most people seek help, and only the person can supply it. And yet it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Both halves of that matter. Not necessary, because some serious presentations involve almost no distress at all. Elevated mood states can feel excellent from the inside. Fixed beliefs held with full conviction do not distress the believer. In those cases the distress is real. It sits in the family, or the workplace. Not sufficient, because ordinary life produces severe suffering that is not a disorder. Grief after a death. A relationship ending. The strain of poverty or discrimination. Treat suffering as proof of disorder, and you convert ordinary difficulty into a category.
Dysfunction And Danger
What It Costs, and How Urgent It Is
Dysfunction asks what the pattern is costing the person. Interference with work or study, with relationships, with self-care and daily responsibilities. Of the four, this is the most defensible on its own, for three reasons. First, it is about consequences rather than appearance, not whether behavior looks unusual. Second, it travels across cultures. Roles differ, but every society has roles. Third, it is present in nearly every recognized condition. That is why the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, in its fifth edition, uses it as a gate. Impairment is measured against a prior baseline that is not always known, and support can hide it. Danger behaves unlike the others. It carries enormous weight in law, and little as a definition. It is absent in the overwhelming majority of genuine cases, and where present it is episodic. And the popular link between mental illness and violence runs the wrong way. People with serious conditions are more often the targets of harm than the source.
Side By Side
Every Strength Carries Its Own Failure
It helps to see the four laid out side by side. Deviance captures departure from norms. It is noticed first, and opens the route to care. It fails by pathologizing dissent, and by excusing harm a setting treats as normal. Distress captures the person's own reported suffering, which no observer can supply. It fails by being absent in elevated mood, and abundant in ordinary grief. Dysfunction captures interference with daily roles. It is consequence-based, and it translates. It fails when the baseline is unknown, or when support masks the impairment. Danger captures risk of harm, and sets urgency. Most genuine cases have none of it. Read across any single row. What makes a criterion useful is what produces its failure. That is why the four are used together, rather than ranked against each other.
Three Moderators
Culture, Context, and Time
Every one of those four is moderated by three variables. The answer a criterion gives changes with where, in what situation, and when you ask. Culture supplies the norm that deviance is measured against. It shapes which experiences get expressed as distress, and defines the roles dysfunction depends on. This does not mean anything goes. Cultural relativism says these judgments hold only inside a culture. Its difficulty is that it leaves no ground for identifying harm inside a community that endorses it. Context can invert a symptom. Constant vigilance is a symptom in a safe environment, and an adaptation in a dangerous one. Numbing during an emergency is functional. The same numbing a year later is not. Behavior cannot be judged with the situation stripped out, which is why history is collected first. Across history, categories have been added, redefined, merged, and removed. That the system corrects itself is a point in its favor. That it needed correcting is not.
Kinds Or Degrees
The Categorical View and the Continuum View
One tension runs underneath everything so far. What kind of thing is a psychological condition? The categorical view holds that conditions are kinds. A person has one, or does not. Its strength is that it matches how decisions get made. Treatment is given or withheld. Its weakness is that people just below a threshold resemble people just above it. Symptom counts distribute smoothly, rather than in clumps. The continuum view says the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Everyone sits somewhere on the dimension, and the clinical range is one end of it. Picture one trait, worry, drawn as a single unbroken band. At one end, worry that interferes with nothing. Further along, real suffering below the line. Then the clinical range, where worry has begun to interfere with functioning. The threshold is a line drawn on that band, not a gap between two kinds. Nothing about the trait changes as the line is crossed. What changes is the consequence. Does not meet criteria, and does not need help, are different statements.
Working The Criteria
Three Composite Cases
Three composite cases, constructed for instruction. None describes a real person. Rohan is twenty-four. He checks the door, the stove, and the taps in a fixed sequence. Deviance, met. Distress, met, and severe. Dysfunction, met, at work and at home. Danger, not met. Three of four, and the case is clear. Danger is not required. What moved him across the line was cost, not the routine. Ninety minutes each morning, two formal warnings. Now Marcus, forty-one, brought to attention by his sister rather than by himself. He believes a former employer monitors his communications, and has restructured his life around it. Deviance, met. Dysfunction, met. Danger, met indirectly, through an untreated physical condition. Distress, not met. He reports none, so distress is not required either. This is the harder case. The person best placed to describe his experience says nothing is wrong. What makes it defensible is not the strangeness of the belief, but the documented deterioration. Amara is thirty-three, and hears the voice of her recently deceased mother. Her community expects this in mourning. She finds it comforting, her functioning is intact, and nothing is met. Now give that identical report to someone with no such tradition. She finds the voice intrusive, and has stopped going to work. The judgment differs, and not because one community disapproves. Distress is present, and functioning has declined. Culture changes what the experience means, and the other three criteria answer differently.
What To Carry
Durable Claims From This Section
Gather the section into claims worth keeping. Abnormal psychology studies patterns that cause distress, or impair functioning. It is a field of knowledge, distinct from the professions that draw on it. Its difficulty is that abnormal resists definition. Rarity, oddity, and undesirability all fail, the last of them dangerously. Deviance notices departure from norms first, but what it measures is conformity. Distress supplies what only the person can report, and is neither necessary nor sufficient. Dysfunction asks what the pattern costs, and is the most defensible of the four. Danger determines urgency, and is absent in the great majority of genuine cases. All four are moderated by culture, context, and time. A symptom here is expected there. And one question stays open. Is a condition a discrete category, or a continuum? The current system is a compromise, and the course returns to it rather than settling it.
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