Behaviourist Approach To Abnormality

Behaviourists approach assumptions -
The main assumption of the behaviourist approach to understanding abnormality is that all behaviour, normal or abnormal, is learned from the environment. This means that if a behaviour is associated with a positive outcome it is likely to be repeated, but if is associated with a negative one it is unlikely to be repeated. The three types of learning are classical conditioning, operant conditioning and social learning.

Classical conditioning is learning by association. An abnormal behaviour can be acquired by associating an environmental stimulus (e.g. a dog) with a biological response (e.g. pain and fear when bitten) so that every time a person that has been bitten by a dog subsequently sees a dog, they
We try to make sense of the world through cognitive processes, and the brain has developed a way to organise many of our cognitive processes into an easy to access set of rules and ideas called schemas. Schemas function to help us quickly and automatically make sense of events and situations, and they lead to automatic thoughts about those events and situations. Examples of automatic thought processes could be the familiar set of rules for making a cup of tea, or that someone we have known to be generous in the past will be generous in the future. We attempt to automatically make sense of our own and other people’s behaviour through attributions based on our schemas. People with psychological problems may have inaccurate expectations about the world and other people's behaviour based on faulty attributions and schemas. For example, a person who has experienced relationship problems may expect relationships to end in failure, which makes them more likely to and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the cognitive model of abnormality is based on faulty cognitions, it follows that all biased cognitions can be replaced by more appropriate ones. An example might be replacing “failing a class test means I am useless at psychology” with “failing a class test means I need to study a bit harder.” Clearly the first belief is a negative over generalisation, but the replacement gives scope for improvement and puts the failure into context. Changing faulty thinking will lead to a change in behaviour. Using the example above, if a person who has failed a test feels they are useless then they may behave in a depressed or anxious way, but if they attribute their failed test to not working hard enough then they will probably behave in a more positive and determined