Biological Approach to Abnomality

Biological Model treats abnormality as physical symptoms.

The cause of the symptoms maybe one of the following:

• Genetics -Faulty genes causes some diseases that has psychological effects. ie. Huntington's Disease leading to deteriorated mental abilities.
• Neurotransmitters -Too much or too little may produce psychological disorders. Increased Dopamine is linked with schizophrenia. Cociane increases dopamine levels, lead to schizophrenia-like sysmptoms.
• Infection - disorders maybe cause by an infection. General paresis is a condition relating to delusions and mood swings leading to paralysis and death.It is caused by syphilis(STD).
• Brain Injury- accidental brain damage may cause abnomality. ie Phineas Gage's head destroyed, mostly frontal lobes by an explosion in 1848. He had a different personality; became more impulsive, disorganised and couldn't plan the future.

Reseach into Genes on Schizophrenia

1.Twin Studies

-Gottesman wanted to find out if genes played a part in develoving schizophrenia. So did a meta-analysis on approx. 40 twins in 1991. He found that indentical twins has 48% of developing schizophrenia. Reduced to 17% in non identical twins. This shows thats schizophrenia is strongly influenced by genes.

Evaluation: The research has high ecological validity as meta-analysis was carried out on field studies. As twins have 100% indentical genes, they might be expected to always suffer the same conditions. Although…