Psychological Abnormality

Biological Approach
1. assumptions: Abnormalities are caused by something being wrong with your biology
2. depression In link to low levels of serotonin and schizophrenia with high levels of dopamine
3. Watson 1998 isolated monkeys which lead to a lowering of their serotonin levels and reduced them to a state much like depression
4. + It can decrease the stigma associated with abnormality by assuming it was not the patens fault
5. Treatments = electroconvulsive therapy, Drugs ( e.g. Depression can be treated with tricyclic drugs)
6. - the drug treatments can cause side effects
7. - It is also heavily reductionist
The Cognitive approach
1. Human behaviour is based on schemata and negative schemata lead to negative automatic thoughts which can lead to abnormality. faultily thought leads to abnormality
2. Becks model of depression: involves three negative schemata, called the negative triad
  1. Negative view of self, negative view of world and negative view of future- to the negative triad there are three dimensions
    1. Attributions can be internal (their fault) or external (circumstances), specific (one event) or global (all events) and stable (constant) or unstable (vary over time)
3. Ellis's ABC model of depression
  1. A: Activating event
    1. B: Beliefs about A
      1. Rational thought
      2. Irrational thought
      3. C: Consequences of B
        Desirable emotions
        Desirable Behaviour
        Undesirable emotions
        Undesirable Behaviour
4. ne treatment is Cognitive behaviour theropy
5. Clear evidence for Cognitive approach of dysfunctional thinking leading to depression and anxiety disorder (panic disorder) - Clark 1986 raised heart rate
  1. Can be the other way round = depression leads to faultily thinking
6. Idea of schemata and how they develop are very vague
The behaviourist approach
1. Assumes maladaptive behaviour is learnt
2. Classical conditioning explains abnormality, as learning to be afraid of something, via an early childhood trauma
  1. Pavlov's Dog's experiment, conditioning dogs to salivate when they hear a bell due to repeated paring with food
3. Operant Conditioning
  1. Learning something when repeatedly pared with a reward Skinners rat and pigeon experiment
  2. For example, if when you are feeling 'down' one day and everyone was nice to you then you may start feeling good and associate these things becoming depressed
4. Social learning theory
  1. Bandura and the Bobo doll experiment in which in children who watched an adult assault a doll repeated this behaviour when playing
  2. e.g. seeing that your parents are afraid of something can cause a phobia in the child
5. one treatment would be systematic desensitisation- introducing something someone has a phobia of in small doses to uncondition their phobia
6. + treatments are usually effective
7. - extremely deterministic
The Psychodynamic approach
1. Based on Freud's work
2. Id (controlled by want for primary drives), ego (conscious self, operates on the reality principle due to the moral rules set out by our culture) and the super ego is the moral authority
  1. An unresolved conflict between these three aspect of out personality can cause anxiety and an abnormality
3. another cause of abnormality is fixation in one of the psychosexual stages of development
  1. The Oral stage from birth to 18 months were babies get pleasure from feeding
    1. If you get fixated (over or under fed) during the Oral stage can led to over eating, smoking or Drinking on the other end it could led to anorexia
  2. The Anal stage from 18 months to 3 years of age, were the activities revolve around retaining and expelling faeces, fixation in this stage can cause OCD
  3. The Phallic stage form 3 to four/ five years, were difference in sex are noticed and pleasure is generally gotten from genital stimulus
    1. Boys work through the Oedipus complex and girls the Elektra complex, fixation in this stage can lead to abnormal behaviour
4. One treatment would be free association
5. + Freud was the first psychologist to link adult abnormality and childhood trauma
6. - Freud's theories are almost impossible to test and relating a few cause studies to everyone dose not take individual differences in to account

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Psychological Abnormality

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	Created by jsavage1 over 10 years ago