MSE

Question 1

What is perplexity of affect?

Answer 1

-Bewildered, puzzled
Often co-occurs with serious thinking abnormality
Consider organic / psychotic

Question 2

What is a fatuous affect?

Answer 2

Vacant, silly, superficial.

Often incongruent with thought / situation. Think - psychotic.

Question 3

What is range?

Answer 3

Diversity of affective responses the patient can mount

Question 4

When is range of affect commonly reduced?

Answer 4

Organic, psychotic and affective disorders

Question 5

What is blunting?

Answer 5

Loss of sensitivity to emotional import of event; loss of empathy for an emotional event.
Common in psychotic states e.g. schizophrenia.

Question 6

How does blunting differ from flattening?

Answer 6

-Little awareness of emotionality of an event cf flattening where there is awareness of emotionality but little capacity for emotional response

Question 7

Slow thought stream in which disorders?

Answer 7

Depression, organic states

Question 8

Pressured thought stream when?

Answer 8

Manic states

Question 9

What is thought form?

Answer 9

Connectivity of ideas.

Concerned with logicality / understandability of connection between one thought and another

Question 10

What are examples of disorders of thought form with abnormal connections between thoughts?

Answer 10

• Tangentiality
• Derailment
• Blocking
• Word salad

Question 11

What are the features of a delusion?

Answer 11

• Fixed unshakeable beliefs held with absolute conviction
• Great personal significance
• Regarded as false by others
• out of keeping with psychosocial background
• Emerge in a pathological manner
• Extend to contaminate other beliefs (often)
• Evoke persistent idiosyncratic behaviour of potentially damaging nature

Question 12

How does perception differ from sensation?

Answer 12

Sensation = simple experience of the world as received through impulses from sensory organs.
Perception = more complete incorporating sensation and intellectual "knowing". Includes ourselves in relation to the object, assimilates meaning.

Question 13

What is hallucination?

Answer 13

Perception without an object

Question 14

What is insight?

Answer 14

Description of patient illness beliefs. Do they:

• think they are ill?
• know how they are ill?
• know how they became ill?
• think they should treat illness?