Revision – 30.04.14

Cognitive – Biological – Psychodynamic

Pictures, list study/theory and then make revision maps in pairs, photo copy

What is this (2 mins to guess then I will tell you, if you get it earlier tell me then write as much as

you can about this topic)

LA Key Issue -

• Do role models encourage anorexia because they lead to teenagers wanting to be impossibly thin?

Anorexia and anorexia nervosa

• Technically "anorexia" just means a loss of appetite, whereas anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder. In practice though, the vast majority of people just say "anorexia" because it's shorter.

• Bulimia nervosa is… having episodes of binge eating. This is followed by deliberately making themselves sick (self-induced vomiting) or other measures to counteract the excessive food intake.

Key Issue

• 1 in 100 girls said to suffer from an eating disorder

• 8% of 14 year old girls happy with their bodies

• Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham said by 95% of girls in a survey to be most influential role model

Symptoms of Anorexia Nervosa

• Refusal to eat and maintain a minimum average expected body weight.

• Fear of gaining weight• Distorted body image• Amenorrhea (absence of at least three

consecutive menstrual cycles)• Weight less than 85% of expected

Learning Approach-Social Learning Theory

• SLT suggests anorexia nervosa may be due to role models in the media.

• Young people may feel they have to get to around the same weight as thin celebrities in order to be accepted

Social Learning Theory (ARRM)

• Teenagers pay attention to the fact that many celebrity role models are extremely thin.

• They retain this information.• They have the ability to reproduce being thin if they

diet excessively and will do it if they are motivated to do so.

• They can see that their role models are famous and rich and this may motivate them to be thin too. Teenagers may think that being thin is what is needed to be rich and famous or even just accepted.

Explain the issue using L.A• SLT suggests that people imitate role models, especially those they see as

relevant to themselves. • One concept from the learning approach is identification. • When someone identifies with a role model they are likely to imitate their

behaviour. • It is therefore likely that teenage girls will imitate female models and media

celebrities where there is a trend to be very slim. • Studies by Bandura have shown that girls copy female models and boys

copy male models, so if female role models are slim then girls are likely to want to be slim.

• If someone observes behaviour but does not identify with the role model they are not so likely to perform the behaviour.

• Girls who want to be slim are likely to stop eating and can develop eating disorders such as anorexia.

Explain the issue using L.A

• Another concept from the learning approach is reinforcement.

• If a role model is reinforced for being slim, such as being praised, paid more or featured a lot in the media, then they might be imitated more.

Explain the issue using L.A• Studies by Bandura have shown that behaviour that

is rewarded is likely to be imitated more, such as in vicarious learning.

• There is also negative reinforcement for being fat, through criticism and teasing, to avoid being teased, fat children might starve themselves to slim down which may turn into anorexia.

• So not wanting to be fat to avoid criticism and wanting to be slim to get praise, might be two types of reinforcement that help to explain anorexia.

Evaluation of the Learning Approach

+ Lai (2000) found that the rate of anorexia increased for chinese residents in Hong Kong as the culture slowly became more westernised.

+Crisp et al. (1976) found that dancers and fashion models were more likely to develop anorexia nervosa.

+Mumford et al. (1991) found that Arab and Asian women were more likely to develop eating disorders if they moved to the West.

- Doesn’t explain why the disorder usually develops in adolescence.

- Everyone sees the pictures of slim people, so why is it only some of the population develop an eating disorder?

- There are psychodynamic explanations for anorexia nervosa such as fear of growing up and family issues.

Explain the issue using L.A

• As well as this, support comes from the work of Bandura whose research can be criticised as lacking validity as it was carried out in an unnatural setting and used unnatural conditions so.

• Nevertheless anorexia is found around the world between different cultures and cross cultural studies support the idea that anorexia is learned.

Explain the issue using Psychodynamic• The psychodynamic approach suggests that a girl

might starve herself to avoid growing up (adults sexual role) because she is fixated at a certain psychosexual stage.

Biological explanation:• One theory is that the system controlling a person’s sense of appetite

becomes disrupted. • The primary setting of many of these abnormalities originate in a the

limbic system. • A specific system called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) may

be particularly important in eating disorders. • It originates in the following regions in the brain:• Hypothalamus. • The hypothalamus is a small structure that plays a role in controlling

our behavior, such as eating, sexual behavior and sleeping, and regulates body temperature, emotions, secretion of hormones, and movement.

• Appetite is controlled by the hypothalamus. • When your body needs more food, your hypothalamus releases

chemicals to stimulate your appetite.

Biological explanation:

• Once you have eaten enough food, hormones signal to your hypothalamus.

• Your hypothalamus will then release a different set of chemicals that essentially reward you for eating, and make you feel satisfied.

• It is thought that this ‘appetite-reward pathway’ becomes scrambled in people with anorexia.

• The feeling of fullness after a meal does not produce a sense of reward, but a sense of anxiety, guilt or self-loathing.

• In turn, feeling hungry may help reduce these negative feelings.

Key terms & definitions: Brain lateralisation• Refers to the structural & functional differences between the the left

& right hemispheres (sides) of the brain. • Some brain functions seem to be evenly spread across the brain, such

as those connected with sensorimotor functions (connecting movement of limbs with the senses)

• Others seem to be concentrated in one side of the brain more than the other.

• Language is an example of this: for most right-handed people language function is found mainly in the left hemisphere; this is also true for 60% of left-handed people (language is located in the right-hemisphere for less than 20% & the other 20% have bilateral hemisphere function).

• Left hemisphere tends to be: Right hemisphere tends to be:• Speech Creativity• Analysis Patterns• Time Spatial awareness• Sequences Context• Recognises: Recognises:• Words Faces• Letters Places• Numbers Objects

Brain lateralisation & Gender• Some evidence to suggest there are differences between males & females

with regard to brain lateralisation.

• Language tends to be affected by lateralisation: most comprehension & speech functions are controlled by the left hemisphere; visuo-spatial tasks tend to lateralised to the right hemisphere. Pattern is more noticeable in men than women.

• In males, the left hemisphere of the brain shows more activity during the same linguistic tasks than females; women tend to show bilateral activity.

• Brain damage, such as strokes that only affect one side of the brain, seem to cause more profound damage to men than women. E.g., men who suffer strokes may suffer more speech damage than women (McGlone, 1978).

• This is because for women language function is less lateralised, the job of interpreting & producing speech is more evenly spread across the two sides of the brain

• Appears to be true for visuo-spatial tasks; damage to the right side of the brain in men but not women, caused a decline in non-verbal ability (McGlone, 1978).

Brain lateralisation & Gender• Wada et al. (1975), using post-mortem evidence, found that

the left temporal plane tended to be slightly longer than the right, suggesting some degree of brain lateralisation, i.e., more concentrated activity in this side.

• However, not all brains showed this pattern of lateralisation, the majority of brains that did not were female.

• More sophisticated MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) techniques have shown that on average, in males, the left temporal plane was 38% longer than the right, no such differences were found in women (Kulynych et al., 1992).

Brain lateralisation & Gender

• In some language related cognitive tasks, e.g., deciding whether 2 non-words rhymed, results have shown more activity in the left hemisphere of male brains than females, who tended to demonstrate more symmetrical activity (Shaywitz et al., 1995).

• Some research has replicated this finding, but other studies have not.

• One explanation for this might be due to the tasks being performed. Some research might measure activities where there tends to be an inherent difference between men & women, explaining the difference in lateralisation, whilst other studies might compare tasks in which men & women are equally competent (can you name any?).

Godden & Baddely,1975

Context-Dependent memory in two naturalenvironments: on land

and underwater

Godden & Baddely,1975

• Aim: To investigate cue-dependency theory using divers in wet and dry recall conditions

• • Godden and Baddeley wanted to test cue-

dependency theory by investigating the effect of environment on recall.

• This was looking at context cues because it was to do with external environment, not the individual.

Godden & Baddely,1975• In one condition the divers recalled in the

same location where they learnt the words

• In the other condition they recalled in the other location

Procedure

• There were 18 divers from a diving club, and the lists had 36 unrelated words of two or three syllables chosen at random from a word book.

• The word lists were recorded on tape. • There was equipment to play the word lists under the water. • There was also a practice session to teach the divers how to

breathe properly with good timing, so as not to cloud their hearing of the words being read out.

• Each list was read twice, the second time was followed by fifteen numbers which had to be written down by the divers to remove the words from their short-term memory

Procedure

• Each diver did all four conditions, making it a repeated measures design.

• There was 24 hours in between each condition.

• Every condition was carried out in the evening, at the end of a diving day.

• When on land, the divers had to still wear their diving gear

Findings/Results

• As predicted, words learned underwater were best recalled underwater, and words learned best on land were best recalled on land.

Study Environment

Recall Environment

DRY

Recall Environment

WET

DRY 13.5 8.6

WET 8.5 11.4

RESULTS (mean number of words)

Conclusions

• As the hypothesis stated: more words were remembered when recall took place in the same environment as learning: this is to do with the context- dependent cues

• Godden and Baddeley identified some problems with the study, including that the divers were volunteers on a diving holiday, so the setting could not be controlled as the condition on each day was in a different place

Conclusions

• A further difficulty is that there could have been cheating underwater (because the researchers were unable to observe the participants), however, the researchers thought that there was no cheating going on because that would have always produced better results underwater, which you can see is not the case

Conclusions• Also, when the location of learning and recalling the words was different,

the divers had to move from one situation to the other: whereas when the locations were the same, this did not happen

• it is possible that this led to the poorer recall. • Godden and Baddeley chose to investigate this factor further, by running a

second study with two separate groups. • There were 18 divers, who each did the disrupted and non-disrupted

conditions. • The disrupted condition involved going in and out of/out and in the water

in between learning and recall when the situations were the same. • The study produced results of 8.44 words for the non-disrupted condition

and 8.69 words for the disrupted condition. • Because these numbers were so similar, it was concluded that this factor

did not cause the difference in results of the primary study

Conclusions

• Saying these weaknesses, the study did however have strong controls, which makes it replicable so reliability can be tested.

• Also, even though the task was artificial, the participants were all divers who had experience with performing tasks under the water, and so the environment they were in was not unfamiliar, therefore a there was a limited presence of ecological validity for the experiment

Treatment for Phobias: Systematic Desensitisation

• Treatments focus on changing the abnormal behaviour rather than considering thought processes or underlying biological causes… Weakness?

• If we assume that psychological disorders are learned behaviours, then treatments should aim to help the person unlearn the maladaptive behaviour and substitute a more adaptive response in its place.

Systematic Desensitisation

• Systematic desensitisation is based on the principle of incompatible responses i.e. the idea that you cannot be both anxious and relaxed at the same time.

• According to this approach phobias, for example, are thought to be learned anxiety responses to particular stimuli.

• Therefore, the treatment assumes that the phobia can be removed by teaching someone to relax when in contact with the phobic object.

Process:

• Treatment takes place over a number of sessions depending on the strength of the phobia and the client’s ability to relax.

• Therapist and client both jointly agree on what the therapeutic goal should be and the therapy is deemed to be successful once the goal has been reached.

• The process can either be in real exposure to the object or imaginary exposure to the object.

Stages:• Functional Analysis – Careful questioning to discover the nature of

anxiety and possible triggers.• Construction of an Anxiety Hierarchy – Client and therapist devise a

hierarchy of anxiety – provoking situations from the least to the most fearful.

- Example (have a read then complete your own):Fear of spiders

1 Think about spider2 See picture of spider3 Be in same room as spider in glass tank4 Sit next to glass tank with the lid closed5 Sit next to glass tank with the lid open6 Put hand in tank7 Hold spider in hands

Stages:

• Relaxation Training – The client is taught to relax using the methods which suit them best, e.g. listening to their favourite music. Deep muscle relaxation techniques are used (hypnosis, meditation or Valium)

• Gradual Exposure – The phobic object is slowly introduced. Subject relaxes at each stage starting with least fearful and progresses to next stage when fully relaxed to do so

But does it work?

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• How EFFECTIVE is this therapy?• This therapy is very effective with simple phobias such as

phobia of spiders. • McGrath et al (1990) found that 75% of patients with

specific phobias showed clinically significant improvement following the treatment.

• Jones applied SD to infants with phobias. Little Peter had strong phobia of rats and rabbits. Peter was presented with a rabbit in a cage each time he had lunch, 40 sessions later he was able to stroke rabbit and eat lunch at same time.

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• Wolpe (1988) claims that 80-90% of patients

are either apparently cured or much improved after an average of 25-30 sessions.

• However, systematic desensitisation is not effective with disorders such as schizophrenia.

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• How EFFECTIVE is this therapy?• Complex and social phobias such as

agoraphobia do not respond so well and relapse rates are high.

• Craske and Barlow (1993) found that between 60% and 80% of agoraphobics show some improvement after treatment and clients often relapse completely after six months.

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• Are there any PRACTICAL issues involved in the use of this therapy?

• One practical issue for this therapy is patient motivation.• Patients who have opted for therapy will be more

motivated than those who have been coerced. • The successful application of systematic desensitisation

relies on the patients’ willingness to practice relaxation techniques and people differ on how successfully they manage this.

• It does require little equipment and therefore the cost is low.

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• Are there any ETHICAL issues involved in the use of this therapy?

• The treatment is considered to be more ethical than others based on classical conditioning, such as flooding.

• This is because the patient is given more control and will only move on when they feel ready to.

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• POWER of practitioner?• The therapist conditioning the desired

behaviour is in a position of power; they control the hierarchy after it has been decided.

• However, the client has to agree to the therapy and can withdraw from it, which reduces the power of the therapist.

Evaluation of Systematic Desensitisation

• Treating the SYMPTOMS or the CAUSE?• The treatment only focuses on observable

symptoms rather than any deeper underlying causes of phobias.