failure to thrive

Examples of failure to thrive in the following topics:

• Feeding Disorders

  • Most often seen in children, feeding disorders resemble failure to thrive, except there is no medical or physiological condition that can explain the very small amount of food the children consume or their lack of growth.
  • This disturbance must not be due to unavailability of food; to observation of cultural norms; to anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, or another eating disorder; to perceived flaws in one's body shape or weight; or to another medical condition or mental disorder.
  • Working with a clinician can help to change behaviors more quickly than allowing the symptoms to disappear without treatment.
  • Children learn to relax to reduce the anxiety that they feel.
  • Children then listen to this story before eating new foods as a way to imagine themselves participating in an expanded variety of foods while relaxed.

• Transience and Encoding Failure

  • Both transience and encoding failure can limit our ability to store and, later, recall memories.
  • It is easier to remember recent events than those further in the past.
  • The way memories are encoded is personal; it depends on what an individual considers to be relevant and useful, and how it relates to the individual's vision of reality.
  • The main task for working memory is to store information for a short period of time (a few seconds or minutes) in order to be manipulated.
  • Additionally, being able to relate to the information will allow it to be more easily stored.

• Reactive Attachment Disorder

  • Previously in the DSM-IV-TR, RAD was divided into two different types: inhibited type took the form of a persistent failure to initiate or respond to most social interactions in a developmentally appropriate way, while disinhibited type presented itself as indiscriminate sociability, such as excessive familiarity with relative strangers.
  • In the recent revisions to the DSM-5 (2013), however, RAD was narrowed to encompass only the symptoms of the inhibited form, and a new diagnosis of disinhibited social engagement disorder (DSED) was created to encompass the symptoms previously known as RAD-disinhibited type.
  • RAD arises from a failure to form normal attachments to primary caregivers in early childhood.
  • Such a failure could result from severe early experiences of neglect, abuse, abrupt separation from caregivers between the ages of six months and three years, frequent change of caregivers, or a lack of caregiver responsiveness to a child's communicative efforts.
  • RAD arises from a failure to form normal attachments to primary caregivers in early childhood.

• Types of Forgetting

  • Under this theory, you need to follow a certain pathway, or trace, to recall a memory.
  • But disuse of a trace will lead to memory decay, which will ultimately cause retrieval failure.
  • Cue-dependent forgetting, also known as retrieval failure, is the failure to recall information in the absence of memory cues.
  • Occasionally, a person will experience a specific type of retrieval failure called blocking.
  • This is the failure to retrieve a word from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent.

• Memory Retrieval: Recognition and Recall

  • By thinking about a string of events or even words, it is possible to use a previous memory to cue the next item in the series.
  • If you learn to use a new kind of computer and then later have to use the old model again, you might find you have forgotten how to use it.
  • This is due to retroactive interference.
  • Occasionally, a person will experience a specific type of retrieval failure called tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
  • This is the failure to retrieve a word from memory, combined with partial recall and the feeling that retrieval is imminent.

• Positive Psychology

  • The field of psychology as a science has been primarily dedicated to addressing mental illness rather than mental wellness; its research programs and application models have dealt mainly with how people are impaired rather than how they thrive.
  • Rather than detail mental illness, positive psychology aims to study the psychology of people in good mental health.
  • Humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s in response to the limitations of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory and B.
  • One of the founding theorists behind this school of thought was Carl Rogers, whose focus was to ensure that developmental processes led to healthier, if not more creative, personality functioning.
  • Finally, positive institutions are based on strengths to better a community of people.

• The Fallibility of Memory

  • It is easier to remember recent events than those further in the past, and the more we repeat or use information, the more likely it is to enter into long-term memory.
  • "Transience" refers to the general deterioration of a specific memory over time.
  • Proactive interference is when old information inhibits the ability to remember new information, such as when outdated scientific facts interfere with the ability to remember updated facts.
  • Retroactive interference is when new information inhibits the ability to remember old information, such as when hearing recent news figures, then trying to remember earlier facts and figures.
  • The way memories are encoded is personal; it depends on what information an individual considers to be relevant and useful, and how it relates to the individual's vision of reality.

• Bandura's and Rotter's Social-Cognitive Theories of Personality

  • People with an internal locus of control tend to internalize both failures and successes.
  • Males tend to be more internal than females when it comes to personal successes—a factor likely due to cultural norms that emphasize aggressive behavior in males and submissive behavior in females.
  • As people get older, they tend to become more internal as well.
  • People with an external locus of control tend to externalize both successes and failures.
  • An external locus of control may relate to learned helplessness, a behavior in which an organism forced to endure painful or unpleasant stimuli becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are able to escape.

• Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development

  • Failure to master these tasks leads to feelings of inadequacy.
  • If denied the opportunity to act on her environment, she may begin to doubt her abilities, which could lead to low self-esteem and feelings of shame.
  • Children begin to compare themselves with their peers to see how they measure up.
  • Teenagers who struggle to adopt a positive role will likely struggle to "find" themselves as adults.
  • He said that people in late adulthood reflect on their lives and feel either a sense of satisfaction or a sense of failure.

• Substance Abuse and Health

  • For instance, chronic drug abuse can negatively impact memory functioning, impulse control, and reaction time; it can also increase the risk for heart disease, cancer, liver failure, etc.
  • Individuals who use substances to the point of dependence are at even greater risk for physical health problems, or even overdose, due to development of tolerance, or needing to use more and more of the substance to obtain the desired effect.
  • Some people turn to substances to self-medicate for disorders like depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder, only to find that substance use, while diminishing psychological distress in the short-term, only exacerbates the symptoms in the long run. 
  • Users may also lose their appetite and their ability to regulate body temperature.
  • Substance abuse can also lead to secondary physical effects.