O+E Psych explanantions of AN
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- Created by: imanilara
- Created on: 04-02-16 10:33
Intro
Four criteria for AN:
- Anxiety-fearful of weight gain
- Weight-want to control their weight-comulsive exercise/constantly measuring themselves
- Body-image distortion-do not see the level of their thinness,see themselves as fat
- Ameorrhoea-cessation of menstrual periods-inadequate nutrition
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Psychodynamic explanation AO1
One explanation is...HILDE BRUCH 1973
- Origins in early childhood
- Ineffective parents (feed a child that is anxious and comfort them when they are crying down to hunger) vs. effective parents
- Child grows up confused about internal needs and is over reliant on over controlling parents
- In adolescence- personal autonomy desire increases-unable to exert independence
- In order to exert control they take excessive control over body weight
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Psychodynamic explanation AO2
Emperical evidence supporting...
- Steiner et Al 1991- parents of adolescents with AN tend to define the child's physical needs instead of the child defining its own-supports lack of control of the child+relying on parents
- Bruch 1973- parents anticipate the child's needs instead of allowing the child to feel hungry-unresponsive care+over control
- Button and Warren 2001-rely on the opinions of others and feel a lack of control over their own lives-supports Bruch-lack of control is motivatingunconscious factor+over reliance
- Wonderlich 1996-
1099 women, sexually abused in childhood+eating disorder symptoms
History of sexual abuse=elevated risk of ED symptoms
Issues: retrospective data, not all developed ED, all women, difficult to test- repressed memories and unconscious motives
Good-large sample+family issues have an effect of ED symptoms.
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Psychodynamic explanation AO2
- Causality-family over controlling cause AN or is it that the An causes parents to be over controlling...also need longitudinal study+v few have anorexia
- research evidence tends to be case studies-low internal validity and idiographic
- low in replicability
- theory originates from a small sample of viennese women-biased sample
- it should be noted that there are debates-socially sens-can we really blame parents for everything?
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Behavourist Explanation AO1
Three strands: operant and SLT
- people have learned this maladaptive behaviour
- Operant (explain in a sentence)-person diets and loses weight they get compliments (+ve reinforcement), and get reduced anxiety (-ve reinforcement)
- Rewarding feelings, so weight loss behaviour is reinforced+more likely to happen--restrictive dieting+symptoms of AN
- SLT (explain)- women see fashion models being rewarded for thinness with money+fame-imitate this behaviour of role models through identification+lose weight developing AN., to reap the same results
- Theory assumes media is a main factor in ED
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Behavourist Explanation AO2
Evidence supporting that people can learn ED via media:
- Becker-65 Fijian girls before the intro of TV+another 65 after. 3% said they vomited after eating+this increased to 15%-girls who watched more TV=higher risk. wanted to be like women on TV.
Natural experiment-naturally occuring IV-high EV yet low Int val.
Supports idea that western media is factor because study shows change in attitudes before and after western media
Evidence for SLT -BUT...ind groups design-ind. differences-second group may have just had girls that already had the problem
-Only self report-Demand characteristics-no operationalisation of eating behaviour (AN diagnosis rates) -LIMITED - Been a huge change in the prevalence of AN in 30yrs-too fast can't be explained by evol. In this time media images are more intrusive+therefore these messages influence AN-similar correlations for between explosion in muscular models and young men w ED.
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Behavourist Explanation AO2
Weaknesses of this explanation:
Biological-Holland et Al (1988): 45 pairs of female twins where at least one twin had AN-higher concordance with MZ then DZ-56% vs 5%-significant
-supports idea that ED inherited and not related to media-we do not learn it
-Never 100& concordance between mz twins and so not all purely biological-some psych effects too
Some debates- we are all exposed to media but do not all develop eating disorders-media cannot be the sole factor-explnataion doesnt explain why its only a minority
Doesn't explain faulty cognitions-body-image distortion.
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