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Issues and debates - Coggle Diagram
Issues and debates
Nature - Nurture debate
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Psychologists have known for a long time that certain physical characteristics were the results of genetics
This is like things such as eye colour, height, hair colour and life expectancy
The nativist position is the basic assumption that the characteristics of the human species are a product of evolution and that individual differences are the result of each person's unique genetic code
Family, twin and adoption studies show that the relatedness of two people , the more likely they will show the same behaviours
Gottesman and Sheilds pooled the results of around 40 family studies and found that the risk increases to 46% for those with two parents who have schizophrenia
Evolutionary explanations also emphasises the importance of nature as they assume that behaviours or characteristics that increase our chance of survival and reproduction will be naturally selected
Nurture is the view that behaviour is the product of enviornemental influences, which is seen as everything outside of the body
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There is a behavioural theory that suggests that food is assosiates with the mother, and through many repeated pairings, the mother becomes a conditioned stimulus who elicits a conditioned response in the child
Bandura argued that aggression is learned through observation, vicarious reinforcement and imitation
Most researchers are now interested in how nature and nurture interact. The interactionist approach is the view that both nature and nurture work together to shape human behaviour
In psychopathology, many psychologists argue that both a genetic predisposition and an appropriate environmental trigger are required for a psychological disorder to develop; this is set out in the stress-diathesis model
Neural plasticity is another example of how nature and nurture interact. The brain can reorganise itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.
Maguire investigated the hippocampi volume of London taxi drivers brains. They found that the hippocampus on each side of the brain was a larger in taxi drivers in comparison to non taxi drivers.
Culture bias
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Ethnocentrism means seeing the world only from one's own cultural perpective, and believing that that perspective is normal and correct
For example definitions of abnormality vary from culture to culture. Rack claims that African-Carribbeans in Britain are sometimes diagnosed as mentally ill on the basis of behaviour which is completely normal in their subculture
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Cultural relativism insists that behaviour can only be properly understood if the cultural context is taken into consideration
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Smith and Bond found, in their 1998 survey of European textbooks on social policy, that 66% of the studies were American, 32% were European and only 2pm % was the rest of the world
International psychology conferences increase the exchange of ideas between psychologists which has helped to reduce ethnocentrism in psychology and enabled a more nuanced understanding and appreciation of cultural relativism
There has been some progress in the field of diagnosing mental health disorder, as early versions of the DSM ignored mental disorders that are found mainly or exclusively in non American cultures
Universality is when a theory is described as universal, it means that it can apply to all people, irrespective of gender and culture.
Gender bias
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Androcentrism means being centred on, or dominated by, males or the male viewpoint
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A lot of psychologists are trying to reduce the amount of gender bias and they do this by highlighting the importance of women
Another way to reduce gender bias is by taking a feminist approach which restores the imbalance in psychological research and theories
Eagly research claims that females are less effective leaders then males, however Eagly used this research to develop training programmes to reduce the lack of female leaders
Some psychologists don't think males and females are different but instead say that the research methodology is at fault, which leads to males and females seeming different when they actually are not
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Holism and reductionism
Reductioism is the belief that human behaviour can be explained by breaking it down into simpler component parts. Those who take a reductionist position believe that the best way to understand behaviour is to look closely at the parts that make up our systems and then use the simplest explanations ti understand how they work
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Types of reductionism
Biological reductionism refers to the way that biological psychologists try to reduce behaviour to a physical level and explain it in terms of neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, brain structure, etc
Explanations of psychological disorders are often biologically reductionist, as genes and neurochemical imbalances are offered as the main cause
Environmental reductionism is also known as stimulus response reductionism. Behaviourists assume that all behaviour can be reduced to the simple building blocks of stimulus response associations and that complex behaviours are a series of S-R chains
Holism is the idea that human behaviour should be viewed as a whole integrated experience, and not as separate parts
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Some cognitive psychologists also take a holistic approach e.g. within the area of perception, visual illusions demonstrate that humans perceive more than the sum of the sensations of the retina
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Some psychologists argue that biological reductionism can lead to errors in understanding because it ignores the complexity of human behaviours
The holistic explanations do not establish causation because they do not examine behaviour in terms of operationalised variables that can be manipulated and measured. This means that holistic explanations are viewed as unscientific
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