Glossary
Antisocial personality disorder: An enduring pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others along with lack of remorse. An individual with this disorder may lie, engage in aggressive behaviors, and manipulate others for profit or pleasure.
Avoidant personality disorder: An enduring pattern of extreme sensitivity to rejection and fear of criticism. While desirous of interpersonal relationships, individuals limit relationships due to shamed or ridiculed.
Body illusion: A perception that one’s own body is significantly different from its actual configuration. For example, a person lying in bed may feel as if they are levitating.
Borderline personality disorder: An enduring pattern of instability in mood, affect, impulsivity, self-image, and interpersonal relationships. Emotions are intense and risk for suicidal and self-injurious behaviors is high.
Dependent personality disorder: An enduring sense of needing to be taken care of, resulting in submissive behaviors and difficulty making decisions. An individual may go to excessive lengths to obtain nurturance from others while fearing being left on their own.
Dissociative symptoms: The experience of detachment or feeling as if one is outside of one’s body with loss of memory.
Entitlement: Unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment.
Histrionic personality disorder: An enduring pattern of emotionality and attention seeking behaviors. Individuals appear entitled, dramatic, and impressionistic in speech and may be inappropriately seductive.
Ideas of reference: False beliefs that coincidental events relate to oneself. For example, a person shopping in a store sees two strangers laughing and believes they are laughing at them, when in reality the other two people do not even notice them.
Magical thinking: The idea that one can influence the outcome of specific events by doing something that has no bearing on the circumstances. For example, a person watching a baseball game exhibits magical thinking when believing that holding the remote control in a certain position caused their favorite player to hit a home run.
Narcissistic personality disorder: A pervasive pattern of heightened sense of self-importance and grandiosity. Preoccupied with entitlement, admiration, status, power, unlimited success. Individuals often lack empathy.
Obsessive compulsive personality disorder: An enduring preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and inflexibility in behaviors. Perfectionism may interfere with task completion.
Paranoid personality disorder: An enduring pattern of behavior characterized by suspiciousness and mistrust of others along with hostility, irritability, and anger, for which they take no responsibility.
Personality: A relatively stable pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that evolves over a person’s lifetime and is unique to each individual. It is influenced by one’s experiences, environment (surroundings and life situations), and inherited characteristics.
Personality disorder: An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates significantly from the expectations of one’s culture. Its onset can be traced back to adolescence or early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts. This pattern of behavior is manifested in two or more of the following areas: cognition/perceptions, affect, interpersonal functioning, and impulse control.
Personality traits: Characteristics, whether considered good or bad, that make up one’s personality.
Schizoid personality disorder: An enduring pattern of social detachment with no desire for, or enjoyment of, close relationships. The individual exhibits flat affect and little enjoyment in activities.
Schizotypal personality disorder: An enduring pattern or odd or eccentric behaviors, magical thinking, and derealization coupled with paranoid ideation and lack of close relationships. Psychosis is generally absent or very brief.
Splitting: A pattern of unstable and intense personal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.
