Abnormality
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- Created by: Laura Davey
- Created on: 03-06-13 13:51
Deviation from social norms
what is it ?
- when someone goes against what is expected or accepted behaviour in a social group
- behaviuor may be incomprehensible to others - people may feel threatened/uncomfortbable
- its behaviour that most of societ stick to e.g. wearing clothes in public
- a persons thinking or behaviour is classified as abonormal if it goes against these social norms
criticisms
- limits freedom of choice = enforcing social control
- culturally specific
- assessment problems
- acceptable behaviour can change over time e.g. homosexuality
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Deviation from ideal mental health
what is it?
- Marie Jahoda used physical health to understand mental health
- abnormal when we fail to meet 'good mental health'
- she used anaology of physical health to undestand mental health - when we worry that something is phsyically wrong, we seek help - she suggested we do the same with mental health
criticisms
- ideal mental health can be subjective
- many cultures dont have independence = wont strive for self actualisation
- cant be compared to getting ideal physical health
- personal growth is culture bound
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Failure to function adequately
what is it?
- when someone cant cope with the task of every day living
- cant cope with daily life - e.g. having voices in your head
- could lead to a diagonosis -e.g. OCD
criticisms
- still includes social norms of adequacy
- issues with freedom and exercising your rights
- it ignores social contet of behaviour
- someone has to make a judgement - making it subjective and culture bound
- abnormal behaviour may be helpful - e.g. a person who has OCD with hand washing may find the behaviour makes htem cheerful, happy and better able to cope with their day
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Biological Approach
- explains abnormal behaviour in terms of abnormal biology - as a consequence of malfunctioning of the biological systems
- therapies include ECT, drug thereapy and psychosurgey
- treats abnormality as a physical condition
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The behavioural approach
- learning theory - classical and operant conditioning
- based on the claim that behaviour is learnt
- e.g. Bandura - what we learn is not the consequence of direct rewards/punishments but of vicarious or second hand reigforcenment
- lear by watching and then imitating
- known as the social learning theory
- treatments involve learning new behaviours through conditioning and/or unlearning old maladaptive behaviours
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The psychodynamic approach
- explains behaviour in terms of its dynamics - i.e. the forces that drive it
- Freud's psychoanalytic theroy of personality
- Freud believed that behaviour was motivated by unconsvious desires - drives that are hidden from our conscious awareness
- originates from conflict or childhood
- conflict between ID, and superego
- if conflict between ID and supeerego is not managed effectively by the ego then the person might develop a psychological disorder
- assumes behaviour is motivated by 2 instinctual drives
- Eros - the sex drive and life instinct
- Thanatos - the aggressive drive and death instinct
- both come from the ID
- aims to treat metnal illness by making the unconscious, conscious, through psychoanalytic theory
- dream analysis
- free association
- hypsnosis
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the psychodynamic approach - ID, Ego, Superego
ID - instinct
- irrational primitive part of personality
- it is present at birth, demands immediate satisfaction and is ruled by the pleasure principle - an innate drive to seek immediate satisfaction
Ego - reality
- conscious rational part of the personality
- develops by the end of the infants first year as a child interacts with the constraints of reality and thus is governed by the reality principle
Superego - morality
- develops between the ages of 3 and 6
- embodies our conscious and sense of right and wrong
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The cognitive approach
- focuses on the internal mental processes
- likens the mind to a computer - information is input, processed, stored and retrieved
- emphasis on how thinking shapes out behaviour
- cognitive psychologist explains all behavour in terms of thoughts, beliefs and attitudes
- explains abnomality in terms of irrational thinking
- treatments = therapies
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Biological Psychology - Essay
AO1
- assumes all metnal health disorders are related to some change in the body
- 3 possible factors (causes)
- genes
- bichemistry/neuroanatomy
- viral infection
- genetic inheritence - passed from parent to child
- investigated by studying twins - there are low concordance rates for some disoders like phobias but high concordance rates for others such as schizophrenia
- many of the genese responsible are a product of evolutionary adaptations in our ancestors despite the traits being no longer useful
- biochemistry/neuroanatomy
- genes tell the body how to function and detemine the structure of the brain e.g. research has shown that schizophrenics have enlarged spaces in their brains = shrinkage of brain tissue
- viral infection
- reasearch suggests that some disorders may be related to exposure to certain virsues in the womb
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Biological Psychology - Essay part II
AO2
- cause and effect?
- available evidence doesnt support a simple cause and effect link between mental illness and altered brain chemistry - e.g. schizophrenia is commonly associated with excess dopamine however some stuides of patients have s hown reduced dopamine
- correlational studies
- immoral to test so findings are based on correlation - investigates relationships and comparisons therefore cause and effect cant be determined
- critics have claimed that the model is inhumane
- Thomas Szasz argued that mentall illness did not have a physical basis therefore shouldnt be thought of in the same way
- inconclusive evidence
- no evidence that mental disorders are purely genetic - concordance rates are never 100%
- Gottesman and Sheilds reviewed 5 twin studies looking for concordance rates for schizophrenia - found 50% concordance rates for MZ twins - its likely that certain disorders inherit a suscpetibilty to the disorder but the disorder itself only develops if the individual is exposed to stressful life situations - stress diathesis model
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Psychodynamic Approach Essay
AO1
- views behaviour in terms of past childhood experiences and the influence of unconscious processes drives and conflicts
- Freud believed medical illnesses were not a phsyical disorder by were as a result of psychological conflicts
- conflicts between the ID ego and superego creates anxiety - ego protects itself (ego defences) - these defences can cause distrubed behaviour if overused
- in childhood if the ego is not developed enough to deal with traumas and therefore they are repressed
- unconscious mind is always in constant conflict with the conscious mind
AO2
- methodological issues
- much of the research was carried out as a case study - although it gives an in depth insight it is usually carried out on one person = limited sample - individiual differences = hard to generalise the findings
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Psychodynamic Approach Essay part II
- unfalsifiable
- unscientific in its analysis of human behaviour -the major claims of the theory cant be proven (e.g. cant prove ID ego and superego exist)
- influential
- the theory has been expanded on by Jung and Erikson
- first to consider psychological illness as having psychological causes
- sample bias
- often on rich men = gender bias
- unreliable source?
- Freud's theory came from what his patients had told him - his therapy where patients could talk freely was therefore susceptible to experimenter bias - could have also been affected by social desirability
- lack of research evidence
- it is both hard to prove and to disprove the theory
- if an individual behaves in the predicted way its considered to support the thoery - thowever if they dont then the theory isnt rejected as the person may be acting as a consequence of their defenc mechanisms
- applicable - both a theory and a therapy
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Behavioural Approach Essay
AO1
- only focuses on behaviours e.g. the way a person responds to their environment
- behaviours may be external or internal
- abnormal behaviours are learned through conditioning or social learning
- all behaviour is determined by extern events - abnormal behaviour is no different to normal behaviour in terms of how it is learnt
- learning environments may reinforce problematic behaviours
AO2
- limited view
- approach is heavily criticised for offering an extrememly limited view on the factors that may cause abnormal behaviour
- explanations tend to ignore the role of cognition in the onset of abnormal behaviour
- symptom not cause
- treatment may only be temproary because they treat the symptoms, remove the symptom and the cause of the porblem still exists so symptoms can resurface
- this suggests that although symptoms may be behavioural, the causes may not be
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Behavioural Approach Essay part II
- Little Albert
- learns to fear things that are fury e.g. a mouse
- case study so hard to generalise
- unethical - would need to be desensitised
- Pavlov's Dog
- successfull conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell
- animal studies
- many of the principles have been established through non human studies therefore hard to generalise wholly to human behaviour
- observer bias
- experimenters focus on observable behaviour - sucsceptible to experimenter bias?
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Cognitive Approach Essay
AO1
- abnormality is caused by faulty thinking
- assumes that thinking, expectations and attitude directs behaviour
- focuses on the mental processes involved in knowing how we direct our attention, percieve, remember, think and solve problems
- cognitive model portrays the individual as being the cause of their owen behaviour because the individual controls their own thoughts
- assumes that we can work out what our cognitions are by controlling what we are exposed to and measuring our response
AO2
- blames the patient
- suggests that th patient is responsible
- may overlook situational factors e.g. life events/family problems
- disorder is in the patients mind and recovery lies in changing that rather than the individuals environment
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Cognitive Approach Essay part II
- consequence rather than cuase
- do thoughts and beliefs really cause disturbance or does a mental disorder lead to faulty thinking - its not clear which one comes first
- irrational beliefs may be realistic
- not all irrational beliefs are irrational
- one study suggested that depressive realists tend to see things for what they are - found that depressed people gave more accurate estimates of the likelihood of a disaster compared to 'normal' controls
- influential
- many supporting studies for 'faulty thinking' having a link to a mental disorder e.g. depression
- combines with other approaches = applicable
- behavioural + cognitive = social learning
- biological + cognitive = evolutional
- support for the therapies
- in a meta analysis of research on psychotherapies, found cognitive therapy as having the 2nd highest average success rate among 10 different forms of psychotherapy
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Biological therapies - Drugs
AO1
- antipsychotic drugs - combat schizophrenia symptoms - block dopamine
- antidepressent drugs - aim to increase the level of serotonin so that more serotonin is left in the synapse therefore prolonging its activity and making transmission of the next impulse easier
- drug therapies work by altering levels of neurochemicals associated with each disorder
AO2
- +ve easy to use - little effort from user
- +ve effectiveness
- research indicates that they do work
- report from 2001 showed that relapse rates after 1 year were highest (55%) for schizophrenia patients that had placebale compared to 25% that had the antipsychotic - with 2-23% relapse for drug and therapy - this suggest drugs play an important role
- -ve placebo effects
- effectiveness of drugs may be their psychological effects as well as their chemical effects
- one study reviewed 38 studies of antidepressents - placebo fared almost as well as real drug
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Biologica therapies - Drugs part II
- -ve temporary
- tackles symptoms rather than the acuse
- -ve side effects
- SSRI's - anxiety nausea insomnia, suicidal thoguhts
- some can be very addictive
- side effects are the main reason why they fail
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Biological therapies - ECT
AO1
- administration of a controlled electrical current through electrodes placed on the scalp that induces compulsive seizures which can be effective in relieving a major episode of depression
- used on people where psychotherapy and medication have proved ineffective
- used when their is a risk of suicide because it has quicker results than drugs
- usual given 3 times a week with a patient requiring between 3 and 15 treatments
AO2
- +ve works where other treatments have failed
- +ve 60-70% of ECT patients improve after treatment
- +ve it has save many lives
- -ve one study found that 84% of patients relapsed within 6 months
- -ve can cause impaired memory
- -ve can result in cardiovascular changes + headaches
- -ve 30% reported fear/anxiety in the 1999 DOH report
- -ve patients that had a 'sham' treatment recovered too suggesting attention plays an important role
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Psychological therapies - Psychoanalysis
AO1
- seeks to recover repressed memories or unresolved conflicts
- techniques
- free association - patient expresses thoughts exactly as they occur even if they seem inimportant/irrelevant
- therapist interpretation - therapists listen carefull looking for clues about possible causes of the problem
- working through - examine the same issues over + over
AO2
- -ve based on a flawed theory
- -ve fails to acknowledge individual differences - imposes the same theory on all
- -ve loftus stated 'repressed' memories are likely to be false from therapists planting 'false memories'
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Psychological therapies - SD
AO1
- gradual exposure to a feared stimulus
- based on countre conditioning
- steps
- learn relaxation
- construct desensitisation hierarchy
- visualise each event whilst relaxing
- work through hierarchy
- eventually master fear
AO2
- +ve quick - little effort
- +ve adaptive to multiple fears
- +ve 75% recovery for phobics
- -ve deals with symptoms not cause
- -ve may be less effective on ancient fears (those with an evolutionary basis) e.g. fear of the dark
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Psychological therapies - REBT
AO1
- irrational beliefs are experienced as self defeatingg thoughts
- challenges thinking using logical,empirical and/or pragmatic disputing
- pateint moves from catastrophising to more rational thinking
AO2
- +ve useful for clinical + non clinical groups
- +ve more effective than drugs alone
- -ve it doesnt address the influence of the external environment
- -ve not suitable for all e.g. some may reject its direct challenges
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