Holism and reductionism

• Holism: the idea that any attempt to break up behaviour and experience is inappropriate as these can only be understood by analysing the person/beh as a whole. Feature shared by the humanistic approach, who saw succesful therapy as bringing together all aspects of the whole person
• Reductionism: analyses beh by breaking it down to its constituent parts. It is based on the scientific principle of parismony: that all phenomena should be explained using the most basic principles

Levels of explanation in psychology

• The notion of 'levels of explanation' suggests that there are dif ways of viewing the same phenomena in psych- some more reductionist than others
• For instance, OCD may be understood in a socio-cultural context as producing beh that most would regard as odd. At a psych level, as the experience of having obsessive thoughts. At a physical level, as a sequence of movements involved in washing ones hands 
• Psych itself can also be placed within a hierarchy of science, with the most precise and 'micro' of these disciplines at the bottom, and more general at the top
• Researchers who favour reductionist accounts of beh would see psych as ultimately being replaced by explanations derived from those sciences lower down in the hierarchy

Biological reductionism

• Based on the premise that we are bio organisms made up of physiological structures and processes
• Thus all beh is at some level biological and can therefore be explained through neurochemical, neurophysiological, evolutionary and genetic influences
• This is the assumption of the bio approach and has been succesfully applied to a number of different topic areas in psych, e.g psychoactive drugs and their effects on the brain have contributed much to our understanding of neural processes and the fact that it might be possible to explain serious mental disorders 

Environmental reductionism

• The behaviourist approach is built…