Psychological Abrnormality; Explanations of Mental Abrnormality

Psychological Abrnormality; Explanations of Mental Abrnormality

There are four explanations of Mental Abnormality

1)Biological Reasons

2)Cognitive Thinking reasons

3)Behavioural Reasons

4)Psychodynamic

1)Biological Reasons

• Genes
• Brian Damage
• Drug/Alcohol abuse
• Premeture Birth
• Child Birth
• Brain Chemicals

2)Cognitive Thinking reasons

• Thinking you have to much responability
• stress
• low self esteem
• narcissicm

3)Behavioural Reasons

• Social Influence
• Childhood experiences
• bullying
• discrimination
• How your parents act
• Media influence

4)Psychodynamic

• Bad childhood
• Traumatic experiences

Classical Conditioning
-We learn by accociations

(pavlov dogs) (little Albert) ->responce to other factors which resemble the CR are examples of GENERALISATION. after a while this association becomes less intence, this is an example of ASSOCIATION EXTINGUISH.

Examples; Can explain phobias.
-Learn to associate the item you are scared of with something else that has frightened you.

Noise-->fear
Dog+Noise-->Fear
Dog-->Fear

2) Operant conditioning
-behaviour is rewarded (possitivley reinforced) or punished (negative reinforced) determin whether we repeat certain behaviours again.

(Skinners Box)- Found rats who were rewarded with food when they pressed a leaver, quickly learnt to press it more often.

Examples; Can potentially explain anorexia
-When you loose weight people notice and say nice things, this is seen as a reward for loosing weight so you carry on dieting.

3)Social Learning theory.

BANDURA, 1950

Demonstrated that children will copy the behaviour of a role model
                                       (same sex parent/friend/celeb)

More likely to copy behaviour if they can see it has brought about rewards for the person they are copying.

Examples; Can explain antisocial, aggressive behaviour and partially explain eating disorders. (baribies/airbrushed models) 

Behavioural model of abnormality; Limitations

• Simplistic model. Leaves out thoughts, feelings and mental processes. due to this complexity of human behaviour is not captured. E.G; there is evidence that eating disorder sufferers have a disorted body image which is difficult to exaplin from this model
• Focuses on symptoms and ignores underlying causes. can be viewed as reductionist.
• Ignores biological factors
  

Behavioural model of abnormality; Strengths

• Recognises importance of the enviroment. Takes into account cultural differences
• Behavioural model has led to therapies that have prooved to be sucsessful in treating mental disorders. The sucsess of the treatments provides support for the model.