Psychological explanations for schizophrenia

We've now finished our look at the psychological explations for schizophrenia. There are lots but we focused on the following, and you should make sure you have notes on these:

• The psychodynamic explanation
• The cognitive explanation - there are lots of these but we only looked at the attention-processing explanation. You only need one.
• Family dysfunction models - we looked at expressed emotion (EE) and double binds
• Labelling theory including a look at Rosenhan's study ('Being sane in insane places')

As the biological explanations for schizophrenia (particularly the dopamine hypothesis) are so strong, the diathesis-stress model is crucial in incorporating any psychological explanations. The adoption study by Tienari et al (1994) is a really nice study in demonstrating the mix of nature and nurture involved in 'causing' schizophrenia. This is found in the middle of this big ppt containing all the above explanations. s.

Introduction to Anomalistic Psychology

Yesterday we looked at what we mean by the following terms:

• The paranormal 
• Psi / Psychic 
• Parapsychology 
• Anomalistic psychology 
• Pseudoscience

Essentially, parapsychologists study people with psi or psychic abilities - those that are paranormal, meaning they cannot be explained with our scientific understanding of the universe / brain - with an open mind as to whether such abilities exist. Sometimes they actively seek to find evidence which shows that such abilities are real.

This kind of search for supporting evidence, rather than attempting to falsify a hypothesis, is one of the reasons that parapsychology is often accused of being a pseudoscience - a 'false science'.

Anomalistic psychologists are generally more skeptical, mainstream psychologists, who assume that psi abilities don't actually exist, but who are interested in why so many people believe in them, and in why parapsychologists often produce positive findings in their studies.

While we are covering the Anomalistic content we will also be dealing with a section of the Unit 4 research methods spec, on the scientific method and on the process of validating research through peer reviews and journals. Your homework was to make notes on five features of science, relating each one to some study or theory you have encountered in AS or A2 psychology:

• Replicability 
• Falsifiability 
• Objectivity 
• Experimental method 
• Consistent paradigm

The influence of culture on romantic relationships

I will post some resources here for the finishing-off of our relationships topic later today.

More on childhood and romantic relationships...

Here is a further presentation relating to research on the connection between childhood experiences and adult relationships.

A key issue in this topic is that different approaches can explain the findings of studies such as the Love Quiz - in particular there is a Nature vs Nurture debate angle, as the temperament (genes) hypothesis and continuity (early experience) hypothesis both explain why securely attached babies grow into securely attached adults etc.

There is a good opportunity for a methodological discussion too. Questionnaires like the Love Quiz allow a lot of data to be collected, but samples generally end up being quite biased anyway (readers of the same paper, and a volunteer bias - what type of person responds to this kind of thing?). Structured interviews allow more valid judgements of childhood attachment type to be made, because it's harder for participants motivated by social desirability bias to 'cheat'. The Adult Attachment Interview uses body language and the consistency of answers to different questions to judge how truthful participants are being.

The results of such studies support the original findings - but it could still all be temperament, or social learning for that matter. An even bigger problem for psychologists in this field is that properly scientific testing of these hypotheses isn't possible. Why not? What would be necessary??

How does childhood influence adult romantic relationships?

Sorry it's taken me so long to post this one...

There is some fairly strong evidence for children with secure attachments with their primary care givers growing into adults with secure romantic relationships, with less happy futures ahead of infants who form insecure avoidant or resisntant/ambivalent attachments. The debate is essentially nature vs nurture - the 'continuity hypothesis' is on the nurture side; it is Bowlby's view that infants learn an Internal Working Model of relationships during the critical period in the first two years of their life. However, it could be that they were born that way - the 'temperament hypothesis'.

Here is the presentation, but we only really used the first slide on Monday - your homework is to complete your notes on these and bring them along next Tuesday:

1. Outline Bowlby’s evolutionary theory of attachment. (two sentences max) 
2. Describe the procedures and findings of the strange situation. (two sentences max) 
3. Describe the procedures, findings and conclusions of the ‘Love Quiz’. 
4. What is the ‘continuity’ explanation for this? 
5. What alternative explanations exist? 
6. How strong is the evidence for continuity overall?