Pearson - DISTINCTION Unit 11 Psychological Perspectives for Health and Social Care.

Pearson - DISTINCTION Unit 11 Psychological Perspectives for Health and Social Care.Aim and purpose: This unit aims to enable learners to understand the different psychological approaches that can be used when studying and in particular how these can be used to study health and social care. This unit highlights the different psychological perspectives and encourages learners to apply these approaches to the study of health and social care. The value of psychological studies to the understanding of health and social care will also be examined. Learners will initially consider the meaning of the term ‘theories’ in the context of psychology, and will begin to appreciate the diversity of psychological theories as they progress through the unit. Learners will examine the principal psychological perspectives and then apply them to the health and social care. On completion of this unit a learner should: 1 Understand psychological perspectives 2 Understand psychological approaches to health and social care. Scenario: You are a psychology student who would like to have a career as an educational psychologist. On your workplace experience you have been asked to investigate the need for a new, larger therapy and counselling centre for the service users in your locality. You ultimately need to evaluate two psychological approaches to health and social care provision and put forward your findings and suggest what new provision is needed for your locality. 2 Task 1 The principal psychological perspectives The main psychological perspectives An approach is a perspective that involves certain assumptions about human behaviour, the way they function, which aspects of them are worthy of study and what research methods are appropriate for undertaking this study. There may be several different theories within an approach but they all share these common assumptions. Sometimes people wonder why there are so many different psychology perspectives and whether one approach is correct and others wrong. Most psychologists would agree that no one perspective is correct, although in the past in the early days of psychology, the behaviourist would have said their perspective was the only true scientific one. The psychological perspective is the result of a synthesis of cognitive and behavioral psychology theories. In this tradition of research, three strategies are clear: (1) the adoption of attitude change as the most interesting dependent variable, (2) the modeling of communication (i.e., persuasion) as a special case of behavioral learning theory, and (3) the reliance on experimental social psychology for conceptual and methodological research strategies. The basic communication model proposed by Hovland and Janis (1959) conceived of the communication situation in terms of message content, source identity, type of channel, and setting operating through pre dispositional factors (situational elements that determine what audience members attend to and how) and internal mediating processes (attention, comprehension, and acceptance) in order to produce observable communication effects (changes in opinion, perception, affect, and action). The challenge of a message was to gain the receiver’s interest, then produce the intended effect with understandable and memorable content. The receiver’s interest, of course, could be affected by external qualities of the subject of communication or sender, as well as internal interests, beliefs, and cognitive processing capacities (Andersen, 1972). Thus, the model retained the linear notion of technical communication theories but adopted a strong emphasis on the effects component of the communication process. Main psychological perspectives are: ● Behaviourist approach ● Social learning theory ● Psychodynamic perspective ● Biological approaches ● Humanist approach 3 The behaviourist approach Behaviourism is an approach to psychology that emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction to the psychoanalytic theory of the time. Psychoanalytic theory often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested using rigorous experimental methods. The behaviourist school of thought maintains that behaviours can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as thoughts and beliefs. Rather than focusing on underlying conflicts, behaviourism focuses on observable, overt behaviours that are learned from the environment. Its application to the treatment of mental problems is known as behaviour modification. In the second half of the 20th century, behaviourism was expanded through advances in cognitive theories. While behaviourism and cognitive schools of psychological thought may not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in practical therapeutic applications like cognitive-behavioural therapy, which has been used widely in the treatment of many different mental disorders, such as phobias, and addiction. Some behaviour therapies employ Skinner’s theories of operant conditioning: by not reinforcing certain behaviours, these behaviours can be extinguished. Skinner’s radical behaviourism advanced a “triple contingency” model, which explored the links between the environment, behaviour, and the mind. This later gave rise to applied behaviour analysis (ABA), in which operant conditioning techniques are used to reinforce positive behaviours and punish unwanted behaviours. This approach to treatment has been an effective tool to help children on the autism spectrum, however, it is considered controversial by many who see it as attempting to change or normalise autistic behaviours. Strengths and weaknesses of the behaviourist approach