There are three definitions of abnormality; the first is deviation from social norms. A person will be diagnosed with this when they have deviated from the unwritten rules and standards of society making them seem abnormal. Jahoda identified this abnormality and said there were 6 conditions associated with good mental health. A positive attitude‚ Self-actualisation‚ Resistance to stress‚ Personal autonomy‚ accurate perception of reality‚ and Adaption to the environment. However there are limitations
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Outline and Evaluate the biological approach to abnormality The biological approach sees abnormality as a physical illness and removes psychological blame and responsibility for the behaviour form the patients. Biochemistry; which is where abnormal functioning in the brain can be caused by abnormal levels of neurotransmitters and hormones. Neurotransmitters are the chemical messengers that allow neurones to communicate with one another at synapses. Hormones are chemical messengers that are secreted
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Obedience is when an individual responds to an order from an authority figure. A key study that has looked into research is one carried out by Milgrams in 1963. The aim of the experiment was investigate whether ordinary people will obey a legitimate authority figure even when required to injure an innocent person. Milgrams recruited 40 male participants by advertising for volunteers to take part in his study. Each participant would be paid $4.50. The experiment consisted of one ‘real’ participant
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Outline and evaluate research into maternal deprivation. (18 marks) Bowlby’s maternal deprivation hypothesis suggests that bond disruption between the infant and caregiver in the early years can have detrimental and irreversible effects on the intellectual‚ social‚ and emotional development of the child. He carried out the study on 44 juvenile thieves (that were transferred to his institution)‚ whom he compared to a group of 44 controls. It was a retrospective study using interviews and questionnaires
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Outline and evaluate The SLT theory of aggression. Aggression is defined by Baron & Richardson (1993) as ‘any form of behaviour directed towards the goal of harming or injuring another living being who is motivated to avoid such treatment’. According to Social Learning Theory aggressive behaviour is developed through the environment (rather than being an innate tendency – as the biological and psychoanalytical theories would suggest). If biological theories of aggression were faultless it
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Outline and evaluate the role of endogenous pacemakers and of exogenous zeitgebers in the control of circadian rhythms (8+16) Circadian rhythms are biological rhythms that occur every 24 hours‚ an example of a circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle‚ another circadian rhythm is body temperature which is at its lowest at around 36 degrees at night and it peaks in the morning at 38 degrees. Endogenous pacemakers are internal body ’clocks’ that will modulate biological rhythms‚ the SCN is an example
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Outline and evaluate psychological explanations of schizophrenia (24 marks) Brown and Birley studied stressful life events in the role of relapse in schizophrenics. They found that 50% of people experience a stressful life event e.g. death‚ relationship break-up‚ job loss etc. in the 3 weeks prior to a schizophrenic episode. A control sample reported a low and unchanging level of stressful life events over the same period. However not all evidence supports the role of life events. For example‚
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Outline and evaluate the behavioural approach to psychopathology. (12 marks) Behaviourists believe that all of a person’s complex behaviours are the result of learning through interaction with the environment. Behaviourists deal with the following forms of learning: classical conditioning and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning people learn to associate two stimuli when they occur together‚ such that the response originally elicited by one stimulus is transferred to another. The person
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Outline and evaluate the biological explanation of depression. Biological explanation of depression can be explained by neurotransmitter dysfunction. Neurotransmitters such as noradrenalin and serotonin have been shown to be linked with depression. Bunney at al (1965) found that there was low levels of noradrenaline function in the brain of depressed individuals. Also‚ post mortem studies found increased noradrenaline receptors in the brains of depressed suicide victims. When there is low noradrenaline
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Outline and evaluate research into encoding in memory (8) A study by Baddeley was conducted in 1966. He did two experiments looking into the STM and LTM. In these two studies he gave participants four lists of words. These were a list where the words were acoustically similar another where they were acoustically different and one where they were semantically similar and the last where they were semantically different. They were read the lists and then given an interference task for 20 seconds
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