behavioural approaches to Psychopathology

This PPT shows conceptualisation of behaviourist perspectives of psychopathology. through social learning theory, reinforcements and little albert experiment.

1. Behavioral approaches Shruthi. R

2. GOALS Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. Emphasis on empiricism. Defining problems behaviourally. Measuring change overtly.

3. History They emphasize the study of what is observable—actual behaviours by animals and human beings rather than trying to study or evaluate things that could not be seen or tested. Disagreed with Freud’s idea that personality is fixed in childhood. He argued that personality develops over our entire life, not only in the first few years. Started with John B Watson article(1913), Psychology as behaviourist views it; Human Psychology failed as natural science. Introspection and conscious phenomena are not methods of ascertaining facts. Behaviourism views are objective and experimental. It can be appealed to without consciousness. Major influence on human behaviour is learning from our environment.

4. Pavlov’s classical conditioning Pavlov’s studied the digestive system in dogs. He noted that the dogs began to salivate not only at the taste of food, but also at the sight of food, at the sight of an empty food bowl, and even at the sound of the laboratory assistants’ footsteps.  He trained the dogs to salivate in response to stimuli that had nothing to do with food, such as the sound of a bell, a light, and a touch on the leg. Pavlov realized that an organism has two types of responses to its environment: (1) unconditioned ( unlearned ) responses, or reflexes, and (2) conditioned (learned) responses. CS  NO R. After= CS - CR (salivate) US  UR After= US  UR

5. Watson’s little albert experiment Watson believed that all individual differences in behaviour were due to different experiences of learning. Experiments with Loud noises, rats and Santa Claus masks were conducted to elicit a fear response. First it supports a general belief that infants, even of less than I year of age, are not indifferent to their experiences the child is father to the man. Albert experiment does not prove, that everything which happens to an infant has long-lasting effects, or that this would correspond to the descriptions of the dog’s salivatory reflexes given by Pavlov.

6. Fear conditioning plays a role in creating many anxiety disorders in humans, such as phobias and panic disorders, where people associate cues (such as closed spaces, or a shopping mall) with panic or other emotional trauma. Imagine that you are afraid of dogs and you have just been bitten by a large, vicious dog whilst waiting for a bus. You then find that you have developed an irrational fear of bus stops. Here, rather than a physical response (like dogs drooling), the conditioned stimulus (CS) triggers an emotional reaction.  In substance dependence, When a drug is consumed, it can become paired with previously neutral cues that are present at the same time (e.g., rooms, odors , or drug paraphernalia). if someone associates a particular smell with the high from the drug, whenever that person smells the same odor later, it may cue behavioral or emotional responses that encourage continued use.

7. Operant conditioning

8. Operant conditioning  is a type of associate learning which focuses on consequences that follow a response or behaviour that we make (anything we do, say, or think/feel ) and whether it makes a behaviour more or less likely to occur. Skinner believed that the best way to understand a behaviour is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. (Radical Behaviourism) classical conditioning depends on developing associations between events, operant conditioning involves learning from the consequences of our behaviour. Thorndike was first to propose law of effect. Let us say a young normal weight woman begins to lose weight and her friends and family praise her for doing so, she may continue to lose weight, even if it means starving herself. Her restricted eating behaviour will continue because she now associates a reduction in her diet with the praise and acceptance of others.

9. Positive reinforcement  involves  adding something in order to increase a response . For example, adding a treat will increase the response of sitting; adding praise will increase the chances of your child cleaning his or her room. The most common types of positive reinforcement are praise and reward, and most of us have experienced this as both the giver and receiver. Negative reinforcement  involves  taking something negative away in order to increase a response . Imagine a teenager who is nagged by his parents to take out the garbage week after week. After complaining to his friends about the nagging, he finally one day performs the task and, to his amazement, the nagging stops. The elimination of this negative stimulus is reinforcing and will likely increase the chances that he will take out the garbage next week. Punishment  refers to  adding something aversive in order to decrease a behaviour . The most common example of this is disciplining (e.g., spanking) a child for misbehaving. The child begins to associate being punished with the negative behaviour. The child does not like the punishment and, therefore, to avoid it, he or she will stop behaving in that manner. Extinction  involves  removing something in order to decrease a behaviour.  By having something taken away, a response is decreased.

10. Learned helplessness- Seligman It argues that when events are uncontrollable the organism learns that its behavior and outcomes are independent, and that this learning pro- duces the motivational, cognitive, and emotional effects of uncontrollability. When an experimentally naive dog receives escape-avoidance training in a shuttle box, At the onset of the first painful electric shock, the dog runs frantically about . On the next trial, The dog fails to cross the barrier and escape from shock. . On the next trial, the dog again fails to escape. At first he struggles a bit and then, after a few seconds, seems to give up and passively accept the shock.

11. Inability to control trauma not only disrupts shock escape in a variety of species, but also interferes with a range of adaptive behaviors . Prolonged exposure to pain or other intensely unpleasant states of affairs can generally be expected to produce stress at the physiological level, measurable in animals by stomach ulceration, weight loss and mortality. The most influential hypothesis in this area is that the psychological factor of being unable to react positively to aversive events contributes both to the physiological effects of stress and to the future emotional and motivational characteristics of the individuals concerned. Learned help­lessness, depression is characterized by reduced response initiation as well as a "negative cognitive set"-difficulty in believing or learning that ones own responses will succeed even when they do. In a factor analytic study of the symptoms of depression, a factor including feelings of hopeless­ ness, helplessness, and worthlessness has been characterized as the essence of depression

12. SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY Bandura saw the main influence on behaviour as the result of imitating the behaviour of a model. Conducted study to demonstrate social behaviours can be learned through imitation. (aggression) The main hypothesis being tested was that children exposed to models behaving aggressively will be more likely to behave aggressively than children not exposed to aggressive models. If your parents resort to alcohol consumption to deal with the stressors life presents, then you too might do the same.

13. Developmental pathogenesis Behaviours can be learnt as a consequence of instruction or indoctrination on the part of parents but most of what is learnt acquires from a haphazard series of casual and incidental events to which child is exposed. Children are exposed to contrasting set of perceptions, feelings, attitudes, behaviours . Children will be differently affected by each parent, pathogenesis will reflect complex interaction of these combined experiences. For example rejected by parent child is likely to anticipate equal devaluation by others. As a defence against for the pain child me learn to avoid others and utilize indifference to protective Clock to minimize what is now expected from others. Parents who are punitive and use repressive measures to control their child’s behaviour and thought cause the offsprings to learn to keep in check their impulses and contrary thoughts and by vicarious observation and imitation they adopt this parental behaviour model and begin to be punitive of deviant behaviour on part of others.

14. ANXIETY DISORDERS Mowrer 1970s, proposed fears are acquired through classical conditioning and maintained through operant. CC is learning of associations between an unconditioned stimulus and conditioned stimulus. Dog phobia is learned, when dog bite stimulates pain receptors (UCS), which evokes pain (UCR). Pain becomes associated with UCS. Hence, CS becomes fear evoking, ie CR. Rachman and Seligman (1976), revised the model for fear acquisition: 1. direct conditioning; 2. modeling; 3. informational and instructional transmission.

15. DEPRESSION According to behavioural conceptualizations of depression, depressive symptoms arise when positive reinforcement (RCPR) for healthy behaviours decreases ( Lewinsohn 1974) Loss of PCPR deprives individual of pleasure and leads to feelings of dysphoria. The construct of avoidance can be defined as attempts to prevent, escape, or reduce contact with subjectively aversive or minimally rewarding internal or external stimuli. (thoughts, emotions, memories) There is a relationship between avoidance and depression that is largely explained by the mediating role of reduced positive reinforcement.

16. OCD Mowrer suggested that fear of stimuli, such as thoughts, images or objects, is acquired through CS. In the first stage of Mowrer’s model, neutral stimuli, such as thoughts and images, become conditioned stimuli through pairing with another unconditioned stimulus that naturally provokes fear. As theorized, a traumatic event should represent the catalyst for the activation of obsessive compulsive symptoms. For example, an individual might develop contamination obsessions following a serious illness, or doubting obsessions following a house fire. Symptom Maintenance. According to the second stage of Mowrer’s (1960) model, fear is maintained though operant conditioning processes, notably escape and avoidance behaviors . Learning theory frameworks were extended to account for the range of compulsive rituals observed in OCD. Compulsions were conceptualized as active avoidance strategies that are negatively reinforced and become habitual, given their success in reducing the fear caused by the arrival of the obsession, and the prevention of extinction (Dollard & Miller, 1950).

17. This hypothesized functional relationship, between obsessions causing distress and compulsive, escape, and avoidance behaviors reducing obsessional distress, is so widely accepted that it is built into the modern nosologic description of the disorder (APA, 2000). Beyond classical overt compulsions (such as washing and checking), a broader range of operant conditioning factors have been implicated in the maintenance of OCD. For instance, “safety behaviors ,” a term referring to a variety of overt or covert strategies that are typically more subtle than compulsions, are often used to avoid or escape a feared outcome (Deacon & Maack , 2008; Salkovskis , 1991). Similar to compulsions, safety behaviors are negatively reinforced by effectively reducing anxiety in the short term, and have been implicated in the maintenance, and perhaps even exacerbation, of OCD symptoms, because they focus attention on feared stimuli and may be used to justify the non-occurrence of a catastrophe (Deacon & Maack , 2008; Salkovskis , 1991).

18. Personality Disorders Locke’s Tabula rasa is the brain, everything is learned. Skinner: all disorders are the by product of environmentally based reinforcing experiences. Differences between adaptive and maladaptive behaviour can be traced to differences in the reinforcement patterns children were exposed to. ” behaviour is a function of environment’. Staats : “paradigmatic behaviourism ” = learning of basic behavioural repertoires begins at birth and proceeds hierarchically. Each repertoire is foundation for for successive more complex one. Eg , fine motor movements have to be learned before learning cursive writing.

19. Bibliography Millon . B, Oxford textbook of psychopathology, (2009). Poling .A, Schlinger . H., Psychology a behavioural overview., (1991).