Bibliographic record
Abstract
Essentials of Abnormal Psychology, First Canadian Edition, by V. Mark Durand, David H. Barlow, and Sherry H. Stewart Thomson Nelson, 2007, 728 pages (ISBN: 0-17-610388-0, CA$99.95 Paperback) Reviewed by MARIA I. MEDVED DOI : 10.1037/0708-5591.49.1.73 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?). The authors state that their intention for this textbook was to foreground an integrative multidimensional perspective, with emphasis on life-span developmental influences, legal and ethical issues, the scientist-practitioner approach, and treatment options, to name a few. In this review, I will cover each of these; I will begin by examining life-span developmental influences. I find this topic is often given short shrift in many abnormal psychology textbooks, often with coverage limited to a specific chapter on developmental disorders and perhaps mentioning in passing that certain disorders may be related to childhood experiences. In contrast, Essentials of Abnormal Psychology interweaves developmental issues throughout the book. In the chapter on depression, for example, there is a section illustrating how depression might manifest itself in children and adolescents from the ages of 0-36 months to 13-18 years. Rather than recount, summarise, and evaluate the entire book chapter by chapter, I will highlight only certain chapters. One particularly fine chapter is the one on substance-related disorders. Specifically, this section is chock full of Canadian statistics, and to my mind, is especially strong in foregrounding national (and/or provincial) approaches to substance-related disorders. It is also very strong in the presentation of cutting-edge research conducted across Canada. Harm reduction research is illustrated in the context of Vancouver's safe injection sites; it is pointed out that controlled drinking-much of the research having been conducted at what is now the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto-as a treatment choice is moderately accepted in Canada (more than in the United States and less than in the United Kingdom); and medical marijuana is discussed in the context of Health Canada's decision to allow its use under certain medical circumstances. I believe that students would also be interested to read the authors' opinions on substance-related disorders in people from First Nations; unfortunately, this topic is not given the reporting it deserves. Given that sleep difficulties plague so many in Western societies, it is surprising how inadequate the coverage of sleep disorders is in abnormal psychology textbooks-it is often completely lacking. Finally we have a textbook that gives sleep its due. In my work as a clinician, it seems as if a large proportion of clients who walk through the door have some sort of sleep complaint. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.075 | 0.030 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".