Understanding Eating Disorders and Memory: Key Concepts
Unit 4: Understanding Eating Disorders
Eating disorders are not lifestyle choices but illnesses that cause disturbances in a person’s eating behaviors. Anorexia, bulimia, and binge-eating disorder are types of eating disorders.
What Causes Eating Disorders?
Many people with eating disorders suffer from low self-esteem, feelings of helplessness, and intense dissatisfaction with their appearance. Specific traits are linked to each disorder. For instance, people with anorexia tend to be perfectionistic, while people with bulimia are often impulsive. Physical factors, such as genetics, may also play a role in increasing the risk.
Consequences of Eating Disorders
The principal consequences include a distorted body image and bodies that are either extremely thin or overweight. Over time, brain damage, anemia, infertility, heart attack, and dehydration can occur.
Professionals Involved in Treatment
Qualified therapists, such as licensed psychologists with experience in this area, can help those who suffer from eating disorders regain control of their eating behaviors and their lives.
The Maudsley Approach
The Maudsley approach is a form of family therapy used in anorexia treatment that enlists parents’ aid in helping their children eat again.
Effective Therapies for Bulimia
Two types of psychotherapy can help individuals stop bingeing and purging:
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy: Helps individuals change unrealistically negative thoughts about their appearance and modify their eating behaviors.
- Interpersonal psychotherapy: Helps individuals improve the quality of their relationships, learn how to address conflicts directly, and expand their social networks.
Approaches to Treat Binge-Eating Disorders
Treatment involves establishing adequate nutrition, reducing excessive exercise, stopping purging behaviors, and undergoing therapy with a psychologist.
Definitions
Anorexia Nervosa: An eating disorder primarily affecting adolescent girls and young women, characterized by a pathological fear of gaining weight.
Bulimia Nervosa: An eating disorder in which a person eats a large amount of food and then vomits or uses other methods to purge the food.
Binge-Eating: An eating disorder in which a person eats a large amount of food compulsively, often leading to obesity.
Self-Esteem: An individual’s overall subjective emotional evaluation of their own worth.
Relapse: The return of an illness after a period of improvement.
Unit 5: Understanding Memory
Memory is the ability to encode, store, retain, and subsequently recall information and past experiences in the human brain.
How Memories Are Stored
The relationship between memory and learning is that they are both involved in our behavior and are stimulated by external stimuli.
Distributed Memory
Our memory is not located in one particular place in the brain but is instead a brain-wide process in which several different areas of the brain act in conjunction with one another.
Branch of Psychology Focusing on Memory
Cognitive psychology.
Short-Term Memory
Short-term memory (STM) is the capacity for holding information in the brain for a short period. The information is stored in the prefrontal cortex. Information stored in STM can pass to long-term memory (LTM) through repetition and association.
Information Storage in Short-Term Memory
The central executive part of the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain appears to play a fundamental role in short-term and working memory. It serves as a temporary store for short-term memory, where information is kept available while it’s needed for current reasoning processes, and it also “calls up” information from elsewhere in the brain.
The prefrontal cortex cooperates with other parts of the cortex from which it extracts information for brief periods.
Transferring Information to Long-Term Memory
Information can be transferred to long-term memory through a conscious effort to retain it. This transfer can be facilitated or improved by mental repetition or, even more effectively, by giving it meaning and associating it with other previously acquired knowledge. Motivation is also a consideration.
Increasing Short-Term Memory Capacity
Chunking is the organization of material into shorter, meaningful groups to make them more manageable.
Displacement
Displacement is the action where new content gradually pushes out older content in short-term memory.
Long-Term Memory
Long-term memory (LTM) is the capacity for holding information in the brain for a long period, with an infinite storage capacity.