Phychological Perspectives

P1) Explain the principal psychological perspectives:
* Describe how the principles of classical conditioning can explain why a patient is petrified of having injections; * Describe how the principles of operant conditioning could explain why a child has persistent tantrums.

P1) Psychology uses seven different theoretical perspectives to explore psychological events: * Evolutonary Perspective – is about how nature selects traits that promote the perpetuation of one‘s genes; * Behavioral Perspective – is about how we learn observable responses; * Neuroscience Perspective – is about how the brain and body creates memories, emotions and sensory experiences; * Social-Cultural Perspective – is about how our thinking and behaviour vary across the situations and cultures; * Psychodynamic Perspective – is about how our behaviour springs from unconcious drives and conflicts; * Cognitive Perspective – is about how we process, encode, store and retrieve information; * Behavior Genetics Perspective – is about how much our genes and environment influence our individual differences.

So what means classical conditioning?
It is a form of learning in which one stimulus (the conditioned stimulus or CS), comes to signal the occurrence of a second stimulus (the unconditioned stimulus or US).

And how the principles of it can explain why a patient is petrified of having injections? Conditioning is usually done by pairing the two events. The first event is called a stimulus and the second is a response. So if a patient is petrified of having injections, it means that he or she suffered from very painfull prick in his/her childhood (from bee‘s sting or he/she stept on the glass), and it caused that a patient have an automatic psysiological reaction of being afraid of injections.

What means operant conditioning?
It is a type of learning in which the consequences of an organism’s behaviour determine whether it will be repeated in the future. It also operates on the environment and is maintained by its consequences.

How the principles of operant conditioning could explain why a child has persistent tantrums? If the consequence in a child‘s life was unpleasant (punishment), for example, if he/she suffered from physical or emotional abuse, it could explain why a child has persistent tantrums. But also a child could have persistent tantrums because he/she wants to get something sweet and if this behavior leads to the consequence of mother buying him/her sweets to keep a child quiet, a child will learn to repeat the same behavior in order to receive this consequence.

P2) Explain different psychological approches to health practice. * The social learning perspective shows that we can learn new behaviours by observing and imitating others. Use the concepts of social learning theory to explain how this could apply to the promotion of healthy lifestyles.

P2) The person we imitate is know as a model. We can copy people, who we like, behaviour, dressing or speaking, but if this „model“ gets punished, we are less likely to imitate his behaviour. So if you want to keep fit and healthy, you will need to find a ‚model‘, who will inspire you. And if this model reached his/her aim and now is the most healthier person in the world, you will also try to imitate his behaviour, to learn his menu and eat and do everything he/she done to reach the same as he/she did.