Unit 8 Health and Social Care Task 1 and 2 - Psychological Perspectives for Health and Social Care

Unit 8 - Task 1 and 2 - Psychological Perspectives for Health and Social Care

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES

There are a variety of different psychological perspectives that each explain behaviour based on different sets of ideas and beliefs.

BEHAVIOURIST PERSPECTIVE

This is the perspective where we learned that or behaviour stimulated different responses, whether they were negative or positive. Things in this aspect will include particular traits such as: Optimism or pessimism, shyness or confidence as well as more ‘random’ acts of behaviour like volunteering to help somebody around the house. - (Health and social care book 1 pg 338) There’s a variety of key assumptions in the behaviourist perspective, these are: that people are concerned with the observed behaviour as opposed to internal events like emotions and thinking, they believe that observable behaviour can be scientifically /objectively measured and that people who take part in this have no free will which means that their environment will determine their behaviour meaning that the results found aren’t honest or reliable.

In this psychological perspective, there are two key psychologists. Ivan Pavlov, who created classical conditioning and Frederic Skinner, who created operant conditioning. Both the individuals had a big influence on society with their findings. Firstly, Classical Conditioning. This was created by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and his beliefs to behaviourism were that behaviour is the result of the stimulus. His main focus was associative learning. This would involve learning many reflexes through different associations between the stimulus that would always naturally trigger the response, known as the primary stimulus and the new stimulus known as the secondary stimulus. The overall result is the conditioned reflex action that has taken place. In Ivan Pavlov’s experiment there were four key terms. These key terms with the Unconditioned stimulus, Unconditioned response, Conditioned response and conditioned stimulus.

The unconditioned stimulus is the stimulus that consistently lead to an unlearned (automatic) response. For example, the noise of thunder. The unconditioned response is the response that will usually occur when an unconditioned stimulus is presented. For example jumping when you hear the sound of the thunder. The conditioned stimulus is a previously neutral stimulus. After being repeated with an unconditioned stimulus it will eventually produce a learned (conditioned) response. For example a bell ringing. The conditioned response is the newly developed response that is now automatic and has developed through a course of training the usual stimulus. For example, a dog salivating at the sound of a bell.

Pavlov’s experiment involved looking at how a dog