A personality disorder is a psychological disorder characterized by inflexible and

enduring behavior patterns that impair social functioning.

Antisocial personality disorder is a personality disorder in which the person (usually
a man) exhibits a lack or conscience for wrongdoing, even toward friends and family
members. The person may be aggressive and ruthless or a clever con artist. The
person’s lack of conscience begins plain before age 15, as he beings to lie, steal, fight, or
display unrestrained sexual behavior. About half of such children become antisocial
adults – unable to keep a job, irresponsible as a spouse and parent, and assaultive or
otherwise criminal. When the antisocial personality combines a keen intelligence with
amorality, the result may be a charming and clever con artist – or worse.
The antisocial personality disorder is woven of both biological and psychological
strands. No single gene codes for a complex behavior such as crime, but twin and
adoption studies reveal that biological relatives of certain individuals are at risk for
antisocial behavior. Their genetic vulnerability appears as a fearless approach to life.
When they await aversive events, such as electric shocks or loud noise, they show little
autonomic nervous system arousal. Even as youngsters, before committing any crime,
they react with lower levels of stress hormones than do others their age.
Boys who later become aggressive or antisocial as adolescents tended, as young
children, to have been impulsive, inhibited, unconcerned with social rewards, and low in
anxiety. PET scans of murderers show that there is reduced activity in the murderer’s
frontal lobe, which controls judgments and impulses.
Both schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders are psychological disorders.
Psychological disorders are a “harmful dysfunction” in which behavior is judged to be
atypical, disturbing, maladaptive, and unjustifiable. Schizophrenia is a group of severe
disorders characterized by disorganized and delusional thinking, disturbed perceptions,
and inappropriate emotions and actions. Schizophrenic patients have delusions which are
false beliefs, often of persecution of grandeur, that may accompany psychotic disorders.
Jumping from one idea to another may occur even within sentences, creating a sort of
“word salad.” Those with paranoid tendencies are particularly prone to delusions of
persecutions. Psychologists believe that disorganized thoughts result from a breakdown
in selective attention. Selective attention is our ability to give our undivided attention to
one stimuli even amid background stimuli. Schizophrenia sufferers cannot do this.
Also a person with schizophrenia may have disturbed perceptions. Such
hallucinations (sensory experience without sensory stimulation) are usually auditory. The
person may hear voices that make insulting statements or give orders. Less commonly,
people see, feel, taste, or smell things that are not there.
The emotions of schizophrenia are often utterly inappropriate. Some patients laugh
at serious and grieving times or the lapse into a flat effect, a zombie like state of
apparent apathy. Motor behavior may also be inappropriate. The person may perform
senseless, compulsive acts. Those who exhibit catatonia may remain motionless for
hours on end and then become agitated. Schizophrenia has subtypes of paranoid,
disorganized, catatonic, undifferentiated, and residual.
Schizophrenia has been explained with theories of chemical imbalances in the
brain. One such key involves the over activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Researchers speculate that such high levels of dopamine create positive symptoms such
as hallucinations and paranoia. Drugs that block dopamine receptors often lessen these
symptoms. However, these drugs have little effect on persistent negative symptoms o
withdrawal. Glutamate, which directs neurons to pass along an impulse, are not being
researched to see if they produce schizophrenic symptoms.
Modern brain scans have revealed that people with chronic schizophrenia have
abnormal brain activity. Some have abnormally low brain activity in the frontal lobes.
Many studies have found enlarged, fluid filled areas and a corresponding shrinkage of
cerebral tissue in schizophrenia patients. Other studies have suggested that the greater
the shrinkage, the worse the thought disorder tends to be. Another possibility is a
prenatal problem. Low birth weight an birth complications such as oxygen deprivation
are known risk factors for schizophrenia.
Evidence also strongly suggests that people with siblings diagnosed with
schizophrenia have a higher change of developing the disorder. However, even though
people have a genetic predisposition for the disorder that predisposition alone is not
enough to cause the disorder. Other factors including prenatal viral infections, oxygen
deprivation, and nutritional deprivation can also cause the disease.
Dissociative disorders are disorder in which conscious awareness becomes
separated (dissociated) from previous memories, thoughts, and feelings. Dissociative
identity disorder is a rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more
distinct and alternating personalities. (Also called multiple personality disorder).Although
people diagnosed as having multiple personalities are usually not violent, there have
been cases in which the person reportedly became dissociated into a “good” and a “bad”
(or aggressive) personality. With the dissociative disorders, as with the anxiety disorder,
both psychoanalytic and learning perspectives see the symptoms as ways of dealing with
anxiety. Psychoanalysts see them as defenses against the anxiety caused by the
eruption of unacceptable impulses. Learning theorists see them as behaviors reinforced
by anxiety reduction. Others view disoociative disorders as post-traumatic disorders so
researchers debate whether most dissociative identity disorder patients suffered
physical, sexual, or emotional abuse as children. But others argue that, even though
most dissociative disorder patients did have a scarring childhood, why not other children,
such as the children in the Holocaust, grow up to also have the disorder.