Paper 1

Social Psychology

Obedience
Theories:
Agency theory Milgram:
● “We are born with the potential for obedience, which then interacts with the influence
of society to create the obedient man” Milgram
● Autonomous state We take responsibility for the consequences of our actions
● Agentic shift We judge whether another person is higher or lower than us in the
social hierarchy and if they have legitimate authority. We change from autonomous to
agentic state
● Agentic state We are acting on their behalf and so responsibility for our actions lies
with them
● Moral strain Symptoms of anxiety that develop especially when obeying orders that
result in harm. Example, two opposing ideas that lead to cognitive dissonance

Social Impact Theory Latané:

● Sources and targets Sources are the people doing the influencing while targets are
people who are influenced.
● S.I.N Social impact is a function of strength (S) multiplied by immediacy (I) multiplied
by the number of sources (S)
○ Strength Perceived power/authority of the source and/or message they
convey. Can be affected by socioeconomic status, age and nature of
relationship
○ Immediacy Closeness of source and target in both a physical and
psychological space
○ Number How many sources are present during interaction
● Multiplicative and divisional effect
○ Multiplicative effect The more perceived strength and immediacy a source
exhibits over a target, the more obedient the target will be
○ Divisional effect When social impact is reduced if there are more targets then
there are sources
 ● Law of diminishing returns In a source group bigger than 3, each additional person
has less of an influencing effect
+ Sedidkes and Jackson (1990) Conducted a field study on obedience at a New York
Zoo.
○ Manipulated strength of source by dressing as zoo keeper - 58% obedience -
or a T-shirt and shorts - 35% obedience.
○ Manipulated how far away the command came from. Same room - 61%
obedience and adjacent room 7%.
○ Tested divisional effect. Group of 2 - 60% obedience. Groups of 6 - 14%
obedience
- Hofling (1966) had an unknown doctor telephone 22 nurses and ask to administer
overdose of drugs. 95% started to administer.
○ Source being absent should have reduced effect

Factors affecting obedience and dissent: Individual differences:

Personality factors
● The authoritarian personality (Adorno 1950) Harsh parenting causes children to
develop authoritarian personality on the F-scale. Permissive parenting allows
children to grow into adults scoring low on F-scale.
● Internal and external locus of control (Rotter 1966) Internals are more likely to show
dissent and defy orders while externals are more likely to be obedient
○ Internal Locus People who take greater responsibility for their actions and
believe they’re in control
○ External locus People who take less responsibility and feel what happens to
them is due to others
+ Elms and Milgram (1966) tested 20 fully obedient participants and 20 who weren’t on
the F- Scale. Obedient participants were higher on F scale and reported other
characteristic of authoritarian personalities e.g less close to father
Gender
● Women are more obedient (Sheridan and King) Pps ordered to give electric shocks
to puppy- 100% of female participants were obedient and 54% of males were
obedient
● Men are more obedient (Kilham and Mann) Replicated Milgram’s study in Australia.
Obedience rate of 28% - 40% male and 16% female
● Moral reasoning (Gilligan)
○ Ethics of Justice More common in males, values of equality and fairness
 ○ Ethics of care More common in females, emphasises interpersonal
relationships

+ Gilligan and Attanucci (1988) tested male and female participants about real-life
situations. Both used the ethic of justice and care. However, males favoured the ethic
of justice and women favoured the ethic of care.
- Blass (1999) summarised nine ‘Milgram style’ studies and found overall no significant
difference between observed levels of obedience.

Factors affecting obedience and dissent: Situation and culture:

Situation
● Legitimacy Reducing perceived legitimacy of the authority figure reduces obedience
e.g. altering modes of dressing, reducing prestige etc
● Proximity Milgram’s telephonic instruction variation increased the distance between
pps and learner. Latané’s concept of immediacy in SIT refers to closeness of target
in terms of space and time. Any physiological or physical barrier to communication
that affects immediacy is called a buffer
● Behaviour of others Exposure to disobedient role models decreases obedience.
Milgram experiment 17 there were two further teachers who refused to carry on- in
this case obedience dropped to 10%.
+ Raaijmakers and Meeus (1995) asked participants to deliver insults to confederates
applying for a job:
○ 90% obedience in baseline
○ 36% obedience when experimenter left the room
○ 16% obedience when witnessing rebellion
Culture
● Individualism-collectivism
○ Individualist Values personal autonomy and self-reliance. People from
individualist cultures(USA and Northern Europe) may be less obedient (value
placed on self-determination and independence)
○ Collectivist Values loyalty to the group, interdependence and cooperation in
pursuit of group goals. People from collectivist countries (China and Brazil)
may be more obedient
● Power distance index (PDI) PDI refers to how accepting people are of hierarchical
order and inequality in society. In high PDI cultures obedience is more likely than in
low PDI cultures
 + Mann and Kilham (1974) found 28% obedience and 36% power index in Australia
and Dolinski (2017) found 90% obedience and 68% power index in Poland.
- Blass (2012) calculated the average obedience rate for eight non-US to be 66%
compared to 61% in the US.

Prejudice
Social Identity Theory (Tajfel and Turner):
Social behaviour is driven by the motivation to maintain a positive sense of self as a valued
member of ‘the group’
● The self and the group Self concept is a sense of who we are and consists of many
social identities. SIT states we have a strong desire to ‘belong’ and we derive self-
esteem through group membership and acceptance by others.
● Social categorisation Mere existence of an outgroup is enough to bring about
prejudice and discrimination
○ The ingroup The social group to which we see ourselves to belong
○ The outgroup Compromises anyone not part of the ingroup
● Social Identification
○ Outward changes altering behaviour to fit with the group norm of the ingroup
○ Inward changes shifts in a person’s thinking, change to self-concept as a new
social identity is formed
● Social Comparison Ingroup is perceived as better, outgroup is perceived as inferior
○ Social comparisons are not objective because they have important influence
on self-esteem
○ Desire to see the ingroup as different and better is known as the quest for
positive distinctiveness
+ Tajfel (1970) worked with 15 Y/O school boys and created an ingroup and outgroup
by telling each boy which others behaved like them or not. Boys were asked to
allocate points to other points and told those points would be exchanged for cash.
○ More points allocated to ingroup than outgroup

Realistic conflict theory (RCT) Sherif

● Intergroup competition Prejudice and hostility intensify when two or more groups
strive for the same goal
● Negative Interdependence is when each group acts to obstruct the other group’s
achievement and one group’s win is contingent on the other group’s loss.
 ○ Intergroup relations deteriorate in situations of negative interdependence,
interactions with people in other group become antagonistic and hostile and
interactions with people in own group become more cooperative
● Limited resources Highest levels of prejudice and discrimination in situations of
competition for physical and finite resources. Resources can be physical and/or
symbolic
● Positive interdependence and superordinate goals these are ways of reducing
prejudice
○ Positive interdependence occurs in situations whether neither group can
reach its goals unless the other group also reaches theirs
○ Superordinate goals can only be achieved through the cooperation of both
groups
+ Tajfel (1970) showed that prejudice can arise from the simple act of perceiving
someone as ‘not like me’. Suggesting prejudice is less about competition and more
about our own knowledge of who we are and our self-worth

Factors affecting prejudice and discrimination: Individual differences

● The Authoritarian personality (Adorno) Harsh parenting offers conditional love.
Children will feel hostile about their conditional love and cannot express their
emotions so displace their emotions on other things/people
● The Authoritarian personality (Allport) Unconditional love creates confidence,
empathetic orientation and ability to think in grey. Authoritarian think in black and
white and are receptive to political arguments targeting inner fears and insecurities
● Right Wing Authoritarianism (Altemeyer) Authoritarian submission, aggression and
conventionalism
○ Have learned set of beliefs about world, socially learned but parents aren’t
source
○ Believe world is dangerous and threatening, want to preserve social order
○ Are suspicious and overly hostile towards anyone who defies the norm
● Social Dominance Orientation (Pratto)
○ Prefer hierarchical versus equal distribution of power
○ See the world as a competitive jungle
○ Learn via role models as part of socialisation
○ Positively correlated with tough-mindedness and negatively correlated with
agreeableness and empathy

Factors affecting prejudice and discrimination: Situation and culture

Situation
● Social norms SIT- people follow ingroup norms because violations may lead to
rejection and then lowered self-esteem due to loss of identity
○ Cantril (1941) group identity is central to formation of prejudice. People are
increasingly prejudiced as they internalise a group’s ‘frame of reference’
○ Minard (1952) white and black US coal miner belonged to ingroup of miners
below ground but held negative groups of each other over ground and are
part of different ingroups
● Competition and resource stress RCT- when groups are in competition for limited
resources which result in prejudice. Prejudice arises if ingroup members see
themselves in direct competition for scarce resources with another group
○ Esses (2001) claim ‘resource stress’ occurs when people believe
commodities are limited
Culture
● Norm of intolerance (Baldwin) suggest all cultures are ethnocentric to some extent
(believe themselves superior)
○ Benevolent intolerance Ingroups behave positively towards outgroups but
justify this as a kindly attempt to support people with lower status but are still
prejudiced
○ Some cultures accept and even encourage outward expression of prejudice
● Norm of fairness Some cultures more concerned with fairness than competition
○ Wetherell (1982) replicated Tajfel’s minimal group experiment in a New
Zealand school. Immigrant Polynesian students were more generous
allocating points to outgroups members than their Caucasian counterparts
○ New Zealand is individualist (79%) whereas Fiji (close to Polynesia) scores
14%

Milgram (1963): Obedience baseline study

Aim:
Investigate to what level of voltage people would give electric shocks to a learner when told
to do so by an authority figure
Design: Controlled observation, independent measures design.
Sample: Volunteer- 40 men, New Haven, paid 4.50
Variables:
IV: None
DV: Maximum shock that participant administers until he refuses to go on
Procedure:
 - "Mr. Wallace"-Learner and "Mr. Williams"
- The participant was always teacher, Mr. Wallace always L and was strapped to a
chair
- T increased volts by 15V from 15V up to 450V
- If T protested, the experimenter delivered standardised prompts eg “Please
continue”, “Please go on” etc
- After the 4th prod, the were allowed to leave
Findings:
60%→450-volt shock
100% → 300-volt shock
35% displayed physical discomfort
Conclusion:
Ordinary Americans are just as likely to be obedient to an authoritative figure. People will
obey an authority figure even if that figure is asking them to do something that will cause
harm.

Generalisability
- The test subjects were all males within a specific age group. So the data obtained
from the experiment cannot necessarily apply to a target population of american
society, as we cannot know if women would behaved differently in these conditions
+ However, Burger (2009) replicated this study following better ethical guidelines and
found similar results on both men and women therefore suggesting that Milgram’s
original experiment, though unethical, may be generalisable to the target population,
American society.
Reliability
+ Burger (2009) followed Milgram’s script wherever possible, indicating high reliability.
Milgram also filmed parts of his study, allowing viewers to review his findings (inter-
rater reliability). Burger concluded very similar results to Milgram.
Application

Validity
- Milgram’s study is low in ecological validity because the situation he put his
participants through was not like obeying a real authority figure. Giving electric
shocks to a learner is artificial and this means the study doesn’t really tell us about
why people obeyed the Nazis, only how they behave in psychology experiments.
- Study could have suffered from demand characteristics as some participants may
have known this was an experiment. As the participants were paid for their time,
 demand characteristics may have played a part in the participant's levels of
obedience, they may have felt an obligation to the experimenter and thus they
followed what the experimenter wanted
Ethics
+ We must consider that this study was done before the BPS guidelines were released
therefore at the time this was ethical enough to proceed. However, looking back we
know this was unethical in many ways.
- The participants were unaware that the learner was an associate of Milgram's.
However, Milgram argued that deception was necessary to produce the desired
outcomes of the experiment.
- The last ethical issue in Milgram's experiment was the right to withdrawal. The BPS
states that researchers should make it plain to participants that they are free to
withdraw at any time (regardless of payment). The experimenter gave four verbal
prods which mostly discouraged withdrawal from the experiment: (1) Please
continue, (2) The experiment requires that you continue, (3) It is absolutely essential
that you continue, and (4) You have no other choice, you must go on

Milgram’s Variational studies

Variables:
IV: location, closeness of authority, lack of presence of authority
DV: Level of obedience shown
Design: Independent measures

Experiment: New baseline

Aim: Investigate situational factors with encourage or discourage dissent
Procedure: In this, Mr. Wallace had a mild heart condition
Findings: 65% of participants were fully obedient

Experiment 10: Rundown office block

Aim: Test effect of prestigious university setting
Findings: 47.5% participants were fully obedient and some voiced doubt about the legitimacy
Conclusion: Situational factors are important, location reduces legitimacy of experiment.

Experiment 7: Telephonic instructions

Procedure: After giving initial instructions, experimenter left lab and gave orders by phone
Findings:
- 22.5% of participants were fully obedient
 - Many lied saying they were shocking when they weren't.
- Other gave repeatedly the lowest shock
- Defiant participants became obedient once experimenter returned
Conclusion: Physical presence of authority figure is important

Experiment 13: Ordinary man

Findings: 80% of participants refused to continue when the ordinary man gave orders
Conclusion: Orders must come from a legitimate source

Sherif (1954/1961): Robber’s cave experiment

Aim:
- Observe how competition and frustration of ingroup affect prejudice towards
outgroup.
- Also to observe methods that encourage ingroup solidarity and cooperation
Design: Field experiment, repeated measures
Variables:
IV: Whether the environment at camp was that of competition or cooperation
DV: Number of friends identified in the outgroup
Sample: 22 boys aged 11, all strangers, emotionally and socially well-adjusted, divided into
matched groups
Procedure:
- Two groups, Rattlers and Eagles
- Group formation: non-competitive activities so boys bonded within their group
- Friction: Groups learn of each other's existence, a tournament(tug of war. baseball) is
created with prizes
- Reducing friction: initial tasks involved social contact, then superordinate goals are
introduced requiring intergroup cooperation eg mending broken water supply and
starting broken-down truck
Findings:
- (1) Groups named themselves, leaders established and differing social norms.
Rattlers were tough and swore. Eagles were anti-swearing and more sensitive
- (2) Hostility developed rapidly, name-calling and fights broke out. Ingroup members
are seen as brave, tough and friendly. 6.4% of Rattlers’ friends were Eagles. 7.5% of
Eagles’ friends were Rattlers
- (3)Social contact and superordinate tasks didn’t reduce friction. Once the boys made
dinner and fixed the truck together, hostility reduced. 36.4% of Rattlers’ friends were
Eagles and 23.3% of Eagles’ friends were Rattlers
Conclusions:
- Intergroup competition leads to increased ingroup favouritism and solidarity but also
to outgroup hostility
- Increased social contact is not enough to reduce prejudice requires a series of
superordinate goals

Generalisability
- Only boys were used, so the results may not generalise the girls or mixed sex
groups. Crucially, they were all children, so the results may not generalise to adults.
This study would only be generalisable to white boys around the age of 11 in the US.
Therefore, this study has low generalisability for the bigger group of children and
would not be generalisable to adults
Reliability
+ Observations of the participant observer were correlated with those of an
independent observer. The two ratings were significantly correlated with each other,
suggesting that observations were reliable
Application
+ The study shows how competition and frustration creates hostility towards outgroups.
In society, this suggests that discrimination and violence could be reduced if jobs,
housing, education and other opportunities were shared more fairly between different
groups, such as ethnic groups or social classes. This is the basis for a lot of Left
Wing political thinking.
+ The study also shows that hostility can be reduced if groups are made to interact and
work together towards common goals. It is not enough for them to be “mere
presences” living alongside each other. This suggests ghettos should be discouraged
and immigrants should be made to take up the host culture’s language, education
and pastimes. This is the basis for a lot of Right Wing political thinking.
Validity
+ The study has ecological validity, because these were real boys at a real summer
camp, doing real activities. Even the specially created tasks (fixing the broken water
pipe, pulling the truck) seemed real to the boys. There were some unrealistic
features, such as the camp counsellors not intervening until the boys were actually
ready to fight each other.
+ Sherif’s study is also valid because he used different methods, like observing and
tape-recording the boys. He collected quantitative and qualitative data about their
behaviour. For example, he scored their outgroup friendships at the end of the friction
and integration phases and found the Rattlers went from 6.4% to 36.4%.
 - Gina Perry (2014) also argues that the observers had a much bigger influence on the
boys than Sherif intended. She points out that the Rattlers took their name from an
incident where a senior counsellor pulled out a gun and shot two snakes, which very
much impressed the boys.
Ethics
- The boys did not give valid consent to be in this study and do not seem to have been
debriefed afterwards – they never realised they were being experimented on. This
certainly fails to respect their autonomy and dignity .
- They were also subjected to risk which the experimenters did little to mitigate.
However, the researchers dropped their professional detachment when a serious
fight nearly broke out and intervened to prevent it; this is an example of scientific
integrity.
+ However, the boys’ parents were aware that this camp was some sort of psychology
project and they did give presumptive consent on their sons’ behalf.

Burger (2009): Would people still obey today?

Aim:
● See whether Milgram’s findings were era-bound.
● Whether obedience is affected by gender or personality traits(empathetic concern
and desire for personal control)
Design: Independent groups
Variables:
IV: manipulating the participants' exposure to a refusing individual
DV: point at which the participants stopped shocking the learner
Sample: Volunteer sample
70 adults; 29 men and 41 women, aged 20-81, 60% had university degree, 55% white, 4%
black,
Procedure:
Replicated Milgram’s experiment 5 but employed 6 ethical safeguards:
- Two-step screening process for people who could react negatively
- Stopped shocks at 150V.
- Mild 15V at start compared to 45V that Milgram gave
- Clinical psychologist supervised all trials and told to end trial if anyone was
distressed
- Participants debriefed almost immediately
Self-report questionnaires were used to measure:
 - Empathetic concern- tendency to experience feelings of sympathy and compassion
for other
- Desire for personal control- How motivated a person is to see themselves control of
the events in their lives
- Researchers recorded final shock administered and terminated the trial when pp
refused to continue after hearing all 4 prods. (Same as milgram)
Findings:
- Obedience was lower than Milgram 70% pressed 150V for Burger while 82.5%
pressed it for Milgram
- No significant difference in obedience between men and women. Men 66.7% and
Women 72.7%
- No significant difference in the empathetic concern scores between the defiant
(19.25) and obedient (19.20) participants
- Defiant participants did have significantly higher desire for personal control scores
(106.92) than obedient participants (98.24)
Conclusion:
- Milgram’s findings are not era-bound not androcentric
- Lack of empathy does not seem to be a valid explanation for high obedience rates
- Desire for personal control does seem to determine the likelihood of defiance
Generalisability
- Sample isn’t representative of the target population. 38% of volunteers were
deselected to exclude anyone who might’ve been distressed. This could lead to lower
levels of obedience
+ Burger’s sample of 70 people is larger than Milgram’s sample of 40. It covers a wider
age range and two thirds of Burger’s sample were women, whereas Milgram’s were
all male. This makes the study more generalisable.

Reliability
+ By filming the whole thing, Burger adds to the inter-rater reliability because other
people can view his participants’ behaviour and judge obedience for themselves.
Application
+ The study demonstrates how obedience to authority works and this can be used to
increase obedience in settings like schools, workplaces and prisons. Authority figures
should wear symbols of authority (uniforms) and justify their authority with reference
to a “greater good”.
+ Testing people for locus of control might identify those most likely to be disobedient –
people with a strong need to be in control are less likely to take orders. Social Impact
 Theory suggests strategies for increasing the pressure on these people to be
obedient.
Validity
- Milgram’s study was criticised for lacking ecological validity because the task is
artificial – in real life, teachers are not asked to deliver electric shocks to learners.
This criticism still applies to Burger’s study.
+ In other ways the study is valid. Because the participants were paid fully in advance,
we can be fairly sure it was social pressure that made them continue shocking, not a
cost/benefit calculation about whether they personally would gain or lose money.
- However, stopping the study at 150V may be invalid. Perhaps participants who were
prepared to go to 165V would still have dropped out later. It is a huge assumption to
say they would have continued to 450V. The “model refusal” group, in particular,
might have had second thoughts as the shocks got stronger.
Ethics
+ The study was approved by the university Ethics Panel, who had the power to shut it
down if it looked like anyone was being harmed.
+ Careful screening ensured pps were suitable to take part in the procedure. Also pps
were told they could withdraw at least 3 times and keep their money, and, by
stopping the procedure at 150v, Burger avoided unnecessary distress to pps.

Cognitive Psychology
Working Memory Model: Baddeley and Hitch 1974

● Model of how short term memory is organised and functions.

 ● Central Executive (CE) Focuses, divides and switches our limited attention. Monitors
incoming data and allocated slave subsystems to tasks. Limited processing capacity
and doesn’t store information
● Phonological Loop (PL) Deals with sounds, so encoding is acoustic. Preserves order
in which information arrives. Subdivided into:
○ Articulatory process Allows maintenance rehearsal. Capacity of loop is two
seconds worth of what you can say
○ Phonological store Stores auditory information
● Visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSS) Deals with visualising, encoding is visual. Limited
capacity of about three or four objects (Baddeley 2003). Subdivided into (Logie
1995):
○ Visual Cache Stores visual data
○ Inner scribe Records arrangement of objects in the visual field. Allows you to
rehearse visual/spatial information
● Episodic Buffer (EB) Temporary store for acoustic, visual and spatial information from
other subsystems, combining this with LTM and wider cognitive processes. Maintains
sense of time recording events. Limited capacity of about 4 chunks (Baddeley 2012)
+ Baddeley (1975) found when participants performed a visual and verbal task together
performance on each was no worse than when carried out separately. When two
visual tasks performed simultaneously, performance on both declined.
- Shallice and Warrington (1970) KF case, he suffered amnesia after a brain injury.
○ Had bad STM for auditory information, but could process visual information
normally
○ KF’s VSS was intact but his PL was damaged

The Multi-store model (MSM) Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968, 1971:

 ● Describes how information is encoded, is stored temporarily (STM) and permanently
(LTM) and retrieval
● Sensory Register (SR) Sense specific memory stores for all stimuli from the
environment
○ Capacity- Large
○ Encoding- Depends on sense
○ Duration- Very brief
○ Key processes- Attention, very little of what goes in SR passes further into
memory system without attention
● Short-term memory (STM) Temporary store for information we pay attention to
○ Capacity- Limited, 5-9 items (Miller 1956)
○ Encoding- Acoustically
○ Duration- 18-30 seconds (Peterson and Peterson 1959)
○ Key Processes- Rehearsal, most information forgotten quickly, but STM
duration can be extended by rehearsal and maintenance until passes onto
LTM
● Long-term memory (LTM) Potentially permanent memory store for material that has
been rehearsed
○ Capacity- Unlimited
○ Encoding- Semantic (Baddeley 1966b)
○ Duration- Unlimited (Bahrick 1975, found pps could recognise names/faces of
schoolmates over 50 years later)
○ Material from LTM has to be transferred back into STM to be recalled
● Information processing Similarities between mind and computers in how information
is processed. MSM uses concepts of a central processing unit.
+ Baddeley (1966a) encoding in STM is acoustic and encoding in LTM is semantic
○ Supports STM and LTM being different stores
- Shallice and Warrington (1970) KF case study. His STM for digits was bad when they
were read aloud to him. But recall was better when he was able to read digits himself
○ MSM not complete because there must be different stores for visual and
auditory information

Explanation of long-term memory Tulving 1972:

● Tulving believed MSM is too simplistic and inflexible
● Episodic memory Ability to recall events/episodes from our lives. Like a diary,
memories are autobiographical
○ Timestamped- remember when they happened
 ○ Multiple elements- ones episode includes several elements i.e. people,
places, object, etc, interwoven to produce single memory
○ Time travel- Can think back to past events. We may not recall exact details,
but we are aware they are personal experience
● Semantic memory Stores our knowledge of the world. Combination of an
encyclopaedia and a dictionary. Includes facts.
○ Language- relies on semantic memory because it stores organised
knowledge of words and underlying concepts
○ Mental representation of things that are not present
○ Less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting than episodic memory
○ Not time-stamped
○ Shared facts- Less personal than episodic memory. Consistently being added
to
+ Case study HM: episodic memory severely impaired as a result of brain damage.
Difficulty recalling events from past but semantic memory was unaffected

Reconstructive memory Bartlett 1932

● Reproduction vs reconstruction Bartlett argued memories are reconstructions and it’s
an active process in which we store fragments of information. We store memory
fragments and when we try to recall, we reconstruct fragments into meaningful
whole. Memory is not a completely accurate record.
● War of ghosts study Bartlett participants read a Native American folk tale and
reproduced it 15 minutes later
○ He showed new version to another person who reproduced it a short time
later- Serial reproduction
○ Story changed e.g canoe to boat, reconstructions were not random but made
the story conventional, coherent and meaningful
● Schema theory ‘Schema’= a mental ‘package’ of knowledge. Different people have
different sets of words
○ During everyday experiences the relevant schema is activated. Schema
allows us to process information about situation more efficiently, by making
guesses based on past experiences
○ Schemas can be changed by new knowledge and experiences
● Schemas and memory Schemas influence what you encode in memory and what you
retrieve
○ Encoding- New knowledge that conflicts with existing schema might now be
encoded in the first place because it doesn’t fit with previous knowledge
 ○ Retrieval- Later on you might recall only those elements of memory fitting
relevant schema. Other elements that don’t fit are either forgotten or recalled
in distorted form

Baddeley (1966b, experiment 3): Acoustic and semantic similarity in LTM

Aim: To find out if LTM encoded acoustically (based on sound) or semantically (based on
meaning).
Design: IVs (1) and (2) are tested using Independent Groups design but IV (3) is tested
through Repeated Measures.
Variables:
IV:
1. Acoustically similar word list or acoustically dissimilar
2. Semantically similar word list or semantically dissimilar
3. Performance before 15 minutes “forgetting” delay and performance after.
DV: Score on a recall test of 10 words; words must be recalled in the correct order
Sample: 72 men and women. There were 15-20 in each condition (15 in Acoustically Similar,
16 in Semantically Similar).
Procedure:
- Participants are split into four groups, according to IV (1) and (2). Each group views a
slideshow of a set of 10 words. Each word appears for 3 seconds.
- Acoustically Similar condition, the participants get a list of words that share a similar
sound (man, cab, can, max, etc) but the Control group get words that are all simple
one syllable words but they do not sound the same (pit, few, cow, pen, etc).
- In the Semantically Similar condition, the words share a similar meaning (great,
large, big, huge, etc) but the Control group gets words that are unconnected (good,
huge, hot, safe, etc).
- Participants in all 4 conditions then carry out an “interference test”
- Repeat this 4 times
- After the 4th trial, the participants get a 15 minute break and perform an unrelated
interference task. Then they are asked to recall the list again. This fifth and final trial
is unexpected.
Findings:
- Acoustically similar words seem to be confusing at
first, but participants soon “catch up” with the
Control group and even overtake them, but this
isn’t statistically significant.
 - Semantically similar words do seem to be
confusing and the experimental group lags
behind the Control group. In fact, the
experimental group never catches up with
the Control group and performs worse
overall than the Acoustically Similar group
above. Very little forgetting takes place,
but scores are lower.

Conclusion:
Baddeley concludes that LTM encoded semantically, at least primarily. His earlier
experiments suggest STM encoded acoustically.

Generalisability
- The sample was made up of British volunteers. It might be that there is something
unusual about the memories of the British or the memorable qualities of British
words.
+ However this is unlikely. LTM works the same for people from all countries, speaking
all languages, so this sample is probably representative.
Reliability
+ Has standardised procedures that you could replicate yourself.
- Baddeley improved the reliability of his own study by getting rid of the read-aloud
word lists (some participants had hearing difficulties) and replacing them with slides.
Everyone saw the same word for the same amount of time (3 seconds).
Application
+ The main application of this study has been for other Cognitive Psychologists, who
have built on Baddeley’s research and investigated LTM in greater depth. Baddeley’s
use of interference tasks to control STM has been particularly influential. Baddeley &
Hitch built on this research and developed a brand new memory model – Working
Memory.
+ Another application is for your own revision. If LTM is encoded semantically, it makes
sense to revise using mind maps that use semantic links. However, reading
passages out loud over and over (rote learning) is acoustic coding, but LTM doesn’t
seem to work this way, so it won't be as effective.
Validity
+ He used controls to do this. Rather than getting participants to recall words, he asked
them to recall word order (with the words themselves on display the whole time). This
 reduced the risk that some words would be hard to recall because they were
unfamiliar or others easy to recall because they had associations for the participants.
Therefore increasing the internal validity
- Ecological validity of this study is not good. Recalling lists of words is quite artificial
but you sometimes have to do it (a shopping list, for example). Recalling the order of
words is completely artificial and doesn’t resemble anything you would use memory
to do in the real world.
Ethics

Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012): Developmental pattern of digit span

Aim:
- Investigate the development of the phonological loop in working memory
- Also to confirm previous findings on digit span and compare Spanish Schoolchildren
with data on Anglo-saxon healthy elderly adults and people with dementia
Design: Independent measures
Variables:
IV: year of schooling
DV: mean verbal digit span
Sample: 575 Spanish children from pre-, primary and secondary (5-17 years)
Procedure:
- Digit span testing- sequences of random digits gradually increased
- Read aloud to pps, they listened and repeated sequences in order
- Digit span was the longest sequence the child could recall; ⅔ times in order without
error
Findings:
Clear increase of digit span with age:
- Youngest age group(5 years): lowest mean of 3.76
- Digit span increased smoothly till 11 years: mean of 5.28
- Rate of increase the slowed and stabilised up to 17 years: mean of 5.91
Comparison with other populations:
- Elderly anglo-saxons had significantly higher digit span that ⅚ years, but not different
than older children
- People with dementia similar to elderly people
- Subgroup of dementia patients, 9 with fvFTD, had mean digit span not different than
⅚ years
Conclusion:
- Findings confirm previous studies that digit span increases with age
 - Spanish children increase continues to 17, while Anglo-saxon children up to 15
- Spanish children had lower average digit span than english children
- This could be due to word length effect; spanish numbers are longer than
english
- Comparison of dementia groups, healthy elderly people and schoolchildren suggests
capacity of PL is affected more by age than dementia
Generalisability
+ They used a large sample of Spanish children that ranged in age and sex. Therefore
their results are generalisable to Spanish school children
- Small sample size for fvFTD pps, this reduces the power of statistical tests, making a
Type 1 error more likely. Therefore the conclusion is questionable
Reliability
+ Lab exp. High level of controls. Standardised procedures. Same order of tasks. One
digit per second. Means we can replicate the research.
Application
+ Helps us to understand how the phonological loop works and what affects it. Helps
us understand why Spanish digit span might be lower. Helps us understand cross-
cultural differences.
+ Helps us understand the extent to which working memory is affected by Alzheimer's
disease and frontotemporal lobe dementia.
Validity
+ Used several standardised procedures which ensure the experience of the study did
not vary much from one another. Control confounding variables and increases
internal validity
+ Digit sequences recalled is a clear measurement of digit span.
+ Measured in a controlled environment so controlled for extraneous variables such as
distractions.
- Lacked control in certain areas, researchers report children ‘didn’t present
impairments’ meaning they did not test for them. This could impact the digit span
task, therefore reducing validity of study.
- Ecological validity can be low. Artificial tasks such as lists of numbers aren't
something we learn in everyday life. Cannot generalise to everyday life. Low
mundane realism.
Ethics
Biological Psychology
The central nervous system and human behaviour
● Central nervous system (CNS) Specialised, complex network of cells.
○ Two major functions:
■ Collecting, processing and responding to information from the
environment
■ Coordinates the working of organs and cells in the body
○ Divided into two main subsystems:
■ CNS, which is spinal cord and brain
■ PNS
● Spinal cord Tube like extension of brain. Connected to the brain via brainstem.
Controls reflex actions.
● Brain Divided into two hemispheres connected by corpus callosum. Control of the
body contralateral. The cerebral cortex is highly developed in humans.

● Subcortical structures ‘Inner’ part of the brain, structures that are ‘below the cortex’
○ Thalamus- brains relay station, receives information from senses and passes
to areas of cerebral cortex for higher processing.
○ Hypothalamus- controls motivational behaviours. Key role in the body's stress
response through control of fight or flight. Maintains balance of bodily
functions and regulates activity of endocrine systems via pituitary gland
○ Limbic system- Several structures related to memory/learning and to
regulating emotion (amygdala)
 ○ Cerebellum- has two hemispheres. Primary role to coordinate posture,
balance and movement. 50% of brain’s neurons
○ Corpus callosum- connects two hemispheres below cerebral cortex, passing
signals back and forth

● Lateralisation and localisation

○ Lateralisation- hemispheres of human brain are almost structurally identical
but have different functions
○ Localisation- certain areas are responsible for specific functions and
behaviours

● Cerebral cortex Has gyri and sulci increasing surface area, giving it more processing
power. Subdivided into four lobes in each hemisphere (total 8 lobes):
Frontal lobe
○ Located at front of of brain and makes up 40% of human cortex
○ Controls high-level cognitive functions e.g. decision making
○ Contains motor cortex, controlling voluntary movements
○ Left frontal lobe includes Broca’s area
Parietal lobe
○ Behind central sulcus
○ Contains somatosensory cortex which contralaterally processes sensory
information from skin
Temporal lobe
○ Beneath lateral sulcus
 ○ Containing auditory cortex, deals with sound from opposite ear, process
location, volume and pitch of sounds
○ Role in understanding language
○ Left temporal lobe is location of Wernicke’s area

Occipital lobe
○ At the back of brain
○ Each lobe contains a primary visual cortex and several secondary areas
○ Everything we see from the right of our field is initially processed by left visual
cortex before being shared with right visual cortex (vice versa)
● Language areas of the brain
○ Broca’s area- Responsible for speech production. Damage causes Broca’s
aphasia
○ Wernicke’s area- Responsible for understanding language. Damage causes
Wernicke’s aphasia

Neurons, synaptic transmission and neurotransmitters

● Structure of the neuron 80% located in brain, allowing nervous system to
communicate by transmitting signals electrically and chemically
○ Cell body- includes nucleus containing genetic information
○ Dendrites- Carry
impulses from other
neurons to cell body
○ Axon- Carries
impulses away from cell
body down length of
neuron
○ Myelin Sheath- Fatty
layer formed from
○ Nodes of Ranvier- Gaps in myelin sheath increase speed by forcing the
impulses to ‘jump’ across gaps along axon
○ Terminal buttons
● Types of neuron
○ Sensory neurons carry messages from sensory receptors along nerves in
PNS to the CNS
○ Motor neurons carry messages from the CNS, along nerves in PNS, to
effectors
 ○ Relay neurons, connect sensory and motor neurons together

● Functions of the neuron

○ Neuron resting state at -55mV, inside of the cell is negatively charged
relative to the outside.
○ When sufficiently activated by a stimulus, inside of a neuron becomes
positively charged for a split second, this is Depolarisation, creating an
Action potential
○ AP is generated once depolarisation reaches a certain threshold potential
and is always the same intensity, regardless of the size of stimulus. If
threshold not reached there is no AP, All-or-nothing response

● Synaptic transmission
1. Neurons communicate within neural networks through synaptic cleft. Within
neurons signals are
transmitted
electrically but
between neurons
signals are
transmitted
chemically across
synapse
2. When AP reaches end
of neuron it triggers release of neurotransmitter from synaptic vesicles
3. When neurotransmitter molecules cross the gap, they fit into receptor sites on
postsynaptic neurons. Chemical signals carried by neurotransmitters are
converted back into electrical signals in postsynaptic neurons which may fire
another AP.
4. Neurotransmitter molecules that remain in synapse are reabsorbed into
presynaptic neuron through reuptake

● Functions of neurotransmitters Several dozen neurotransmitters have been identified

in the human brain each with its own specific molecular structure fitting perfectly into
a specific type of postsynaptic receptor
● Excitation and inhibition
○ Excitation- dopamine causes excitation of postsynaptic neuron by
increasing its positive charge making it more likely to fire
 ○ Inhibition- serotonin inhibits the postsynaptic neuron making the neuron
more negatively charged and less likely to fire
● Summation Firing of postsynaptic neurons depends on summation of signals over
time or space.
○ If net effect is inhibitory then the postsynaptic neuron is less likely to fire.
○ If net effect is excitatory then the postsynaptic neuron is more likely to fire
and momentarily inside of postsynaptic neuron becomes positively charged,
depolarisation occurs and AP travels toward cell body and along axon

Effect of recreational drugs

● Cocaine Stimulant effect on the CNS especially on the brain's main reward system.
Alters synaptic transmission. Greatest impact is on activity of dopamine:
○ All recreational drugs increase release of dopamine in reward centres of the
brain. This reward centre creates a sense of pleasure
○ Cocaine blocks the reuptake of dopamine by binding with dopamine
transporter molecules on terminal buttons of presynaptic neuron (responsible
for recycling dopamine back)
○ As cocaine prevents this, synapse is flooded with surplus quantities of
dopamine, probably the main cause of euphoric high associated with cocaine
use.
● Long-term effects
○ After repeated cocaine use, dopamine receptors become downregulated
(fewer receptors are active, some are damaged and shut down and quantity
of dopamine produced declines)
○ This explains withdrawal, craving for the drug and higher doses need,
building tolerance
● Heroin Depressant effects on the CNS, slowing down activity. Processed in brain
into closely-related opioid, morphine
○ Morphine binds with specific opioid receptors at synapse in cerebral cortex,
limbic system and hyp
○ Heroin/morphine receptors exist because CNS has its own opioid system-
endorphins and enkephalins are produced by the body as natural painkillers.
Heroin taps into natural opioid system, binding with receptors to enhance
natural response
○ Agonist because it mimics the action of other natural biochemical

● Long-term effects
 ○ Repeated heroin use results in downregulation. Opioid receptors on
postsynaptic neurons constantly bind with morphine molecules, desensitising
them to the effects of the drug, which is the basis of tolerance
+ A strength of the idea that dopamine is a key neurotransmitter in the effect of drugs is
that it is supported by research. Volkow (1997) used PET scans to track activity of
dopamine transporters during a cocaine induced high. She found a positive
correlation between extent to which cocaine occupied dopamine transporters and
subjective experience. This supports the theory that drugs such as cocaine will cause
receptors, specifically dopamine to become down-regulated.
- A weakness is that the human brain is complex and therefore isolating the effects of
just one neurotransmitter greatly oversimplifies the process. It is very unlikely that the
complexity of recreational drugs' effects on transmission can be explained by solely
one neurotransmitter. The interactions of dopamine with other neurotransmitter
systems such as noradrenaline, GABA and serotonin are not well understood.
Therefore we cannot fully believe this theory to be correct as it is oversimplifying the
human brain and ignoring the interactions between different neurotransmitters. This
is an example of reductionism as we are reducing this theory to small pieces, one
neurotransmitter affects transmission, instead of considering the whole, the
interactions between different neurotransmitters such as dopamine, GABA,
noradrenaline etc.

Structure of brain and aggression

● Role of limbic system Papez (1937) and MacLean (1952) linked limbic structures to
emotional behaviours such as aggression
○ Key structure for aggression is the amygdala. Has a central role in how
organism assesses and responds to environmental threats and challenges
○ Coccaro (2007) people who had IED had brains scanned by fMRI while they
viewed images of faces. IED pps showed high levels of amygdala activity
when viewing angry faces
○ Association between amygdala reactivity and aggression is meaningful
because an angry facial expression is an ecologically valid sign of threat
● Role of the prefrontal cortex Amygdala functions in tandem with the Orbitofrontal
cortex (OFC), which is a region of the prefrontal cortex just above eye sockets.
○ Plays an important role in higher cognitive functions and is involved in self-
control, impulse regulation and inhibition of aggressive behaviours.
○ In people with psychiatric disorders PFC activity is reduced, disruption
impulse-control function (Coccaro, 2007)
 ○ PET scans of murderers showed they had greater glucose metabolism
activity in amygdala but abnormally low metabolism in prefrontal cortex
including OFC (Raine 1997)

● Role of serotonin Neurotransmitter with widespread effects on neural transmission

○ Normal levels of serotonin in OFC are associated with behavioural self-control
but decreased serotonin may disturb this, reducing self-control and leading to
more impulsive behaviour e.g. Aggression (Denson 2012)
● Role of dopamine Neurotransmitter with inhibitory effects in some areas of the brain
and excitatory effect in others
○ Dopamine is involved in regulating motivated behaviour and reward. Main
influence on aggression comes through interaction with serotonin
○ Serotonin hypofunction stimulates dopamine hyperfunction and both are
linked with impulsivity and aggression (Seo 2018)
○ Serotonin hypofunction is the primary cause of impulsive aggression and
dopamine hyperfunction makes additional contribution
+ Pardini (2014) identified 56 males who had previously been in a study 20 years
earlier at the age of 6/7. They had been involved in criminal and aggressive
behaviours
○ fMRI showed strong negative correlation between aggression levels and
amygdala volume. This couldn't be explained by confounding variables such
as race, age etc
○ (Predictive validity)

Evolution, natural selection and aggression

● Evolution by natural selection Genetic differences between organisms create
variation
○ Variation arises when parents genes are combined and due to spontaneous
mutations
○ Small differences between individuals don’t matter when resources are
available, but when life is heard, individuals who possess characteristics that
help them survive and successfully reproduce pass genes on to next
generation
○ Reproduction is key
● Process of natural selection Environment ‘chooses’ individuals who can survive and
reproduce successfully
 ○ Darwin (1859): After many generations of small differences, there are
individuals who are different from their predecessors. Occurs through natural
selection.
○ Survival of genes; happens when there is competition for scarce resources.
Most useful genes are kept in population and over time before more frequent
○ Outcome is adaptation- (average) survivors are better suited to life in current
environment than (average) predecessor
● Sexual selection Influence of evolution acting on success of reproduction
○ The Peacock's tail appears to threaten the male bird’s survival but the tail is
attractive to females. A sign of genetic fitness, burden (heavy, target for
predators) but still manages to survive.
○ Some characteristics are adaptive because they provide an advantage over
competitors for reproductive rights
○ Aggressive characteristics that allow reproduction are passed off to spring
and genes remain in population
● Evolution and aggression Protecting yourself, partner and offspring would have
enhanced survival and reproduction
○ Mate retention strategies are aggressive behaviours men use to keep
partners and prevent straying e.g coming home early
■ Wilson and Daly (1996) Direct guarding is male vigilance over
partner’s behaviour
○ Guarding offspring- Human parents direct aggressive acts towards other
peopée who threaten their children. Aggression protects parents ‘investment’
and is one of the only situations where females behave as aggressively as
males
- Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) found differences between cultures in aggressive
behaviour. !Kung San people of Kalahari desert aggression are discouraged from
childhood. The Yanomami of Venezuela and Brazil encourage aggression to gain
status in their structured society. Suggesting innately determined behaviour can be
outweighed by cultural norms.
+ Buss (1989) found across 33 countries males preferred younger and more attractive
females possibly because this increases their reproductive success as said women
are more likely to be fertile. While females preferred older, wealthier and hard-
working men because this increases their reproductive success as their children
would be well-supported. Supporting evolutionary theory as it shows that the
predictions from theory are upheld by evidence.
Freud’s Psychodynamic explanation of aggression
● Unconscious and aggression Contains thoughts, memories and desires of which we
are unaware
○ Active processor, requiring a lot of psychic energy to keep contents
unconscious
○ Role as the origin of powerful aggressive instincts. Even if we’re not thinking
conscious aggressive thoughts, our behaviour may still be influenced by
aggressive urges which are ‘hidden’ in unconscious
● Personality and aggression Freud’s tripartite theory is made up of id, ego and
superego
Id and pleasure principle
○ Exists from birth, most primitive, within unconscious
○ Origin of energy that motivates all our behaviour, unacceptable instincts,
impulses and drives
○ Pleasure principle: immediate gratification of desires, no consideration of
other factors, making aggression unavoidable and inevitable
Ego and reality principle
○ Logical, rational, mostly conscious
○ Reality principle: interface between reality and unrealistic desires of id and
social reality
○ Satisfies id by fulfilling urges indirectly and symbolically (e.g. fantasising)
Superego
○ Fulfils ‘moral’ role, sense of right and wrong and ideal image we have of
ourselves and want to live up to
○ Opposes id’s destructive aggressive drive through guilt
● Catharsis and aggression Expressing aggression satisfies an instinctive drive
○ Venting anger is cathartic because it releases psychic energy, reduces
aggressive drive and makes further aggression less likely
○ Preventing catharsis builds up energy, producing destructive aggression
directed inwards (self-harm) or outwards (assault)
○ Freud believed that there were two ways of achieving catharsis
■ Displacement where aggression is towards one person (e.g. boss) is
redirected against a less powerful and more available substitute e.g.
pet, sibling
■ Observing others being aggressive
Role of hormones in human behaviour
● Hormones Manufactured in endocrine glands and secreted directly into bloodstream
 ○ Biochemical messengers. Act more slowly but have widespread and powerful
effect
○ Each hormone affect only a specific target organs or cells
○ Crucial role in fight-or-flight response, helping fuel aggressive response
needed to respond to a threat
● Role of testosterone Male sex hormone may explain why males are more aggressive
than females
○ Key role in regulating social behaviour through influence on areas of brain
implicated in aggression
○ Animal studies show that experimental increases in testosterone are related
to more aggressive behaviour in males of species (Giammanco 2005)
○ Decreases in testosterone as a result of castration are related to reduction in
aggression
○ Dolan (2001) found positive correlation between testosterone levels and
aggressive behaviours in 60 male offenders in UK max. security hospitals
● Dual-hormone hypothesis Testosterone and cortisol interact to cause aggression
○ Cortisol is secreted by adrenal glands to protect against stress
○ Carré and Mehta (2011) found high levels of testosterone lead to aggressive
behaviour only when cortisol levels were low. When cortisol is high,
testosterone’s influence on aggression is blocked.
○ Combined activity of testosterone and cortisol may be a better predictor of
human aggression that either hormone alone
● Female aggression Lower than in males but still enhanced by testosterone
○ Dabbs and Hargrove (1997) found evidence for aggression-testosterone link
in females
○ However, Eisenegger (2011) found that women given a dose of testosterone
behaved more generously and sociably in lab-based negotiating game
○ Aggression-testosterone link in females appears to be more complex that it is
in males, suggesting that non-biological factors may be important
+ Dabbs and Hargrove (1997) measured testosterone in the saliva of 87 female
inmates. They found that the degree of criminal violence used by these women was
positively correlated with testosterone levels. The link between testosterone and
aggression usually found in males was replicated in females, increasing validity of
the association.

Raine (1997): Brain abnormalities in murderers

Aim: Use brain scanning techniques to identify brain abnormalities in people charged with
murder pleading NGRI. Hypothesised brain scans would show dysfunctions in areas linked
to violence (amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus and corpus callosum)
Design: Matched Pairs
Variables:
IV: murderer or non-murderer
DV: glucose metabolism in specific brain areas
Sample: 39 men and 2 women charged with murder or manslaughter. Control group of 41
non-murderers. Matched on age, sex and ethnicity as well as 6 pps with schizophrenia
Procedure:
● Injected with radioactive tracer to light up brain metabolism on scanner
● Completed a continuous-performance task (CPT), of identifying targets on screen
and pressing a button, lasted 32 minutes
● PET scan conducted immediately after
Findings:

Conclusions:
● Murderers pleading NGRI have different brain activity from people who are not
violent offenders.
● Murderers had impaired activity in areas previously linked with violent behaviour
● Dysfunctions in a single brain area cannot explain violent behaviour. However, it is
likely that networks of interacting brain areas are functionally impaired.
● Impairments create a predisposition to violence that is only expressed when social,
environmental and psychological conditions are ‘right’.

Generalisability
 - Findings cannot be generalised to all criminals because they didn’t have a
comparison group of non-violent criminals. This lowers the generalisability.
+ Sample size is quite large. Allowing Raine to be able to compare and match all pps
on things such as ethnicity, brain injury etc. They could conclude that brain
differences were linked to violence/ aggressive behaviour and not individual
differences. Increasing generalisability.
Reliability
- Interpretation of scans can be subject to observer bias. Methods used to decide
where to place scans can also lead to significant variability of localisation of regions
across pps. Reduce reliability of findings and make them harder to interpret.
+ Findings supported previous research. Increases reliability of previous studies and
supports conclusions were not due to chance
+ Methodology was strong, with a lot of controls e.g. times of tasks and how to identify
regions in scans. Allows research to be replicated and increases the reliability of
findings.
Application
+ Help society understand how some violent criminals have complex brain differences,
explaining why they fail to learn from experience.
- Raine argues findings do not show that treating people with brain differences with
medication or surgery would be justified because the brain structures only offer a
partial explanation.
Validity
- PET scans may give misleading results. This is because the technique used to scan
the brain in 10 mm slices is relative to the canthomeatal line. This is an imaginary line
from the corner of the eye to the ear which varies greatly between individuals. Which
reduces the internal validity of the study and casts doubt on the findings
+ High degree of control as all pps were matched across experimental and control
groups on three different confounding variables. Standardised procedures were also
used to control other variables e.g. CPT time. This increases the internal validity as
potential confounding variables are controlled.
Ethics
+ Pps signed consent forms and research was approved by Human Subjects
Committee of University of California
- Pps in experimental group plead NGRI suggesting they may not have been fully
competent to give informed consent

Bredgen 2005: Twin study of social aggression

Aim: Investigated aggression in MZ (identical) and DZ (non-identical) twins to find out:
- Extent to which social and physical aggression are explained by genetic and
environmental influences (shared and nonshared)
- Overlap between social and physical aggression is explained by direct effect of one
type of aggression on the other
Design: Longitudinal twin study, correlational
Variables:
Co-variables: relationship between physical and social aggression between MZ and DZ twin
Co-variables: relationship between teacher and peer ratings
DV: twins’ social and aggressive behaviour was measured by teacher and peer report
Sample:
Selected from the Quebec Newborn Twin Study
234 pairs of 6 y/o twins: MZ Males= 44; MZ Females= 50, DZ Females= 32; DZ males 41;
DZ mixed= 67
Procedure:
Teacher ratings: Teachers rated social and physical aggression of each child on 3-point
scale (Never, sometimes, often) in response to items such as says bad things or spreads
rumours and hits, bites or kicks others
Peer ratings: Given a booklet of photographs of all children in class and asked to nominate 3
children that best matched a description of behaviour. There were two descriptions for social
(tells others not to play with me and tells mean secrets about other children) and two for
physical (gets into fights and hits, bites or kicks others).
Findings:

● Physical aggression mostly explained by genetic factors (63% teacher and 54%
peers)
● Social aggression mostly explained by non-shared environmental factors (60%
teacher and 54% peer)
● Significant correlation between social and physical aggression, explained by
overlapping genetic factors
● Statistical testing showed high physical aggression led to high social aggression but
opposite wasn’t true
Conclusion:
 ● Genetic characteristics predispose some children to aggressive behaviour in general
● Physical aggression is more greatly determined by genetic factors
● Social aggression is more greatly determined by environmental factors

Generalisability
- Results cannot be generalised to other age groups. Social aggression may not be
fully developed till the age of 8 and physical aggression reduces once they start
school.
+ Brendgen uses a large sample (234 twin pairs), so unusual children (anomalies) with
very high or low levels of aggression tend to be “averaged out” by the size of the
data. This makes the sample representative.
Reliability
+ Brendgen uses established questionnaires to measure aggression. These can easily
be replicated, making the study reliable.
+ Two researchers visited each classroom, suggesting the study has inter-rater
reliability.
+ There was a strong correlation between teacher- and peer- ratings, suggesting the
scores are reliable.
- The language differences might make the study less reliable. Questions translated
into another language might have slightly different meanings or become confusing.
Brendgen’s original questionnaires were in French, meaning the English translations
might be unreliable.
Application
+ If social aggression is strongly linked to the environment, it must be possible to
reduce the worst effects of verbal bullying, gossiping and “trolling” in social media by
children, by using early intervention. Classes and workshops might help children
learn less aggressive ways of interacting.
Validity
- Correlations like Brendgren’s do not prove causation. Something else could be
affecting the MZ twins. For example, MZ twins tend to be physically identical and get
mistaken for one another. It might be that one twin gets stereotyped based on the
other twin’s behaviour
- Twin studies are based on the equal environment assumption. This assumption
states that MZ and DZ twins experience similar treatment to the same extent. There
 are many ways in which this assumption may be violated, and so undermining the
validity of the twin study method
+ Researchers used ratings of aggression from two sources. Each twin was rated by
both teachers and other children. The two sets were essentially identical providing
reassurance that they are a valid and reliable measure of aggressive behaviour

Ethics
+ Understanding the causes and development of social aggression is for "the common
good" and this research might maximise benefit for all sorts of school children, not
just twins or Canadians.

Learning theories
Classical conditioning
Simplest form of associative learning
● Process of classical conditioning Unconditioned (not learned) stimulus (UCS) and a
neutral stimulus (NS) are repeatedly paired. The NS eventually produces the same
response as produced by UCS.
○ Occurs in three stages
Before
○ UCS triggers unconditioned response (UCR). Unrelated NS does not produce
this response
During
○ UCS and NS are experienced contiguously, paired.
○ Effect of pairing is greatest when NS occurs just before the UCS
○ Pairing has to take place many times
After
○ Following pairing, NS produces same response as UCS
○ NS is now conditioned stimulus (CS) and the response is called a conditioned
response (CR)
● Extinction CS no longer produces CR
○ When a CS is experienced without the UCS over a period of time the CR is
extinguished (CS ceases to elicit the CR)
○ Has survival value because it means learning is flexible
● Spontaneous recovery CR Reappears
○ Extinct responses reappear even without new pairings with UCS
○ E.G. Conditioned to salivate at sight of chocolate wrappers but go through a
period of having chocolate unwrapped for you and stop seeing wrappers. You
may see wrappers and not respond. However, time later, you may see a
wrapper and dribble
● Stimulus generalisation CR occurs with similar stimuli
 ○ Sometimes we become conditioned to to responds to one stimuli but exhibit
same response to other similar stimuli
- Only explains acquisition of phobias and other behaviours but does not explain
maintenance of said phobias and behaviours. Therefore it is only a partial
explanation of learning behaviour.

Pavlov (1927): Experiment with salivation in dogs

Aim: Investigate how conditioned reflex responses can be created in dogs
Variables:
DV: Salivation
Procedure:
● Done in the lab so production of saliva could
be measured by volume or number of drops
● Established a baseline by measuring the
salivation in response to NS (Metronome)
● Then paired NS with the UCS (food) around 20
times
Findings:
● NS does not initially elicit a salivation
response, whereas UCS elicited immediate
salivation
● After pairings of NS and UCS, NS elicits salivation. Salivation commenced nine
seconds after metronome sound, with 45 drops of saliva
● No salivation in response to NS in backwards pairing
● Extinction of salivation could be seen as salivary volume declines after repeated
presentation of CS without UCS
Conclusion:
Link is likely to be made in the brain between a UCS and an NS that occurs just before the
UCS
+ Design of study reduced impact of extraneous stimuli and enhanced internal validity.
The study took place inside a soundproof chamber to reduce the possibility of
external sounds distracting dogs or providing additional stimuli. Controls make it
likely that salivation in response to the CS was due to conditioning and not
extraneous stimuli
- The study was conducted on dogs, and there is a problem generalising results to
humans. Humans have a larger cerebral cortex than other species and this permits
greater complex cognitive processing.

Operant conditioning
● Operant conditioning
○ Link forming between behaviour and event
○ Behaviour is an act that the individual produces and event is consequence of
behaviour
 ○ Consequences can increase or decrease probability of behaviour being
repeated
● Skinner box (1948)
○ Box containing food pellets that could be released as reinforcers when
animals learned to do something. Some contained electrified floors as
punishment
● Reinforcement Occurs when an event following a behaviour makes its repetition
more likely
○ Anything making a behaviour more likely
○ Event leading to increased likelihood of behaviour being repeated is called a
reinforcer
○ Positive reinforcement when something pleasant follows a behaviour
○ Negative reinforcement when something unpleasant is removed from a
behaviour. Consequence is desirable.
● Primary and secondary reinforcement
○ Primary reinforcers are rewarding because they have biological significance
e.g. food, shelter, sex
○ Secondary reinforcers they become associated with primary reinforcers e.g.
money from a job, cool job makes us sexually attractive
● Punishments Occurs when an event following a behaviour makes it repetition less
likely
○ Event leading to decreased likelihood is a punisher
○ Positive punishment when something unpleasant or aversive is introduced
○ Negative punishment when something nice is removed e.g. being fined or
grounded
○ Some punishers are deliberately introduced to change someones behaviour
○ Other punishers are naturally occurring such as pain

- Doesn’t explain how behaviours originate, it only explains how behaviours are
strengthened or weakened. It’s incomplete as it doesn’t account for learning of new
behaviours.

Operant conditioning: Reinforcement and behaviour modification

Schedules of reinforcement
● Continuous and partial reinforcement Continuous always follows a behaviour and
partial is irregular
○ Continuous reinforcement (e.g. paying a child ever time they clean up) leads
to rapid behavioural changes but effects do not last
○ Partial reinforcement varies either the ratio of behaviour to reinforcement or
interval between reinforcements. Can be fixed or variable
○ Partial schedules are written as F (fixed) or V (variable) with a number
indicating ratio or interval. E.g. FI3 is a fixed interval of 3, meaning three time
units must pass before another response can be rewarded
● Fixed ratio (FR) and variable ratio (VR) reinforcement schedules
○ FR schedule- reinforcer given after specified number of behaviours
○ VR schedule- reinforcer is given after an unpredictable number of behaviours
varying around a mean value
● Fixed interval (FI) and variable interval (VI) reinforcement schedules
 ○ FI schedule- time between reinforcers is constant. E.G. pay a child at end of
time interval if he has washed up once or more in that interval
○ VI schedule- time between reinforcers varies around a mean length of time.
Only on behaviour per interval is needed for reinforcement

Behaviour modification
● Modifying behaviour Using operant conditioning to change behaviour
○ Reinforcement is systematically used to increase a desired behaviour
● Shaping Reinforcing successive approximations to a target behaviour
○ Starts by reinforcing behaviour then reinforcement only continues each time
behaviour is a step closer to target behaviour
○ E.G. Shaping in language acquisition- infant babbling initially reinforced but
only continues if child produces recognisable words

Social Learning Theory

● SLT
○ Bandura proposed SLT to explain how behaviour can be learned by
observing and then imitating
● Modelling One person (the model) demonstrates a behaviour
○ Modelling takes place when one individual (model) displays particular social
behaviour in presence of someone else. Modelling not necessarily deliberate
○ Not all models are imitated- they are most likely to be imitated if they’re same
sex and age as observer as well as being likeable, attractive and of high
social status
○ Observer identifies/ admires with model so imitates behaviour because they
want to be like them
● Observation and imitation
○ Observation (active process)- Observer chooses to focus attention on
modelled behaviour
○ Imitation- copying the observed behaviour and is most important mechanism
of learning in SLT
○ Once behaviour has been observed and stored it can be reproduced when
situation is approaching
● Stages of SLT (Bandura 1977)
○ Four cognitive processes that mediate whether observation of model leads to
imitation:
1. Attention to behaviour of model
2. Retention of observed behaviour
3. Reproduction
4. Motivation to repeat behaviour (vicarious reinforcement)
- Kendler (2015) showed that identical (MZ) twins are more similar in their aggression
levels than non-identical (DZ) twins. This suggests that individual differences in social
behaviour are genetically influenced and not a product of modelling.

Bandura (1961)
Aim:
- Whether aggressive behaviour could be acquired through observation of aggressive
models.
 - Whether children were more likely to aggress having observed aggression
- Whether they selectively imitated same-sex models
- Whether boys were more prone overall to acquiring aggressive behaviour
Design: Matched pair design, lab experiment
Sample: 36 boys and 36 girls, 3-6 Y/O
Variables:
DV: Level of aggression the children displayed
IV:
- Modelling of aggression
- Sex of model
- same/different sex of model and observer
Procedure:
Children were randomly allocated to one of three conditions:
1. Aggression group: Observed an aggressive adult model (punch, kick and shout at
doll)
2. Non-aggression group: Non-aggressive model assembling mechanical toys
3. Control group: No model was present while the children were playing

● Children brought into a room where they were allowed to play with toys (with or
without a model present)
● Children taken to another room where they were deliberately frustrated by shown
new toys and told they were not for them
● Children were taken to a playroom containing a range of toys including a Bobo doll.
Behaviour observed.

Behaviours categorised as:

- Imitative aggression e.g sitting on bobo and behaving aggressively (actions of model)
- Partially imitative e.g. using a mallet aggressively on toys other than Bobo
- Non-imitative aggression e.g. punching Bobo, saying hostile things not said by model
Findings:
● Children who witnessed aggressive model were more likely to completely or partially
imitate aggression
● Children who observed non-aggressive behaviour or who hadn’t observed an adult
displayed less aggression- no aggression in 70% cases
● Children in aggression group were slightly more likely to engage in non-imitative
aggression
● Boys were more likely to imitate aggression shown by same-sex model and more
likely to imitate physical aggression
● Girls were more likely to imitate verbal aggression shown by same-sex models and
showed more verbal aggression than boys
Conclusion:
Social behaviour such as aggression can be acquired by imitation of models. Imitation is
more likely when modelled behaviour is gender-typical and when model and observer are of
same gender
 + Design of experiment reduced impact of extraneous variables, therefore enhancing
internal validity. They controlled this by matching the pps for aggression, reducing the
impact of individual differences which is a potential participant variable. Observing
the children one at a time allowed them to control for conformity effects.
- Study was conducted under artificial conditions. Conducted in a laboratory setting
and situation in which aggression was measured- playing with a doll which is different
from the typical situation in which the children might have displayed aggression
towards a person. Therefore, it lacks external validity and we cannot be sure to what
extent the results can be generalised to settings outside the lab.
- May suffer from demand characteristics as the children may have known what to do
with the doll as it was widely popularised.

Bandura (1963) Film-mediated aggressive models

Aim: Investigate whether a filmed model would have the same effect as a live model on
children’s aggression and if cartoon aggression would have a similar effect to realistic filmed
aggression
Design: Lab experiment, independent group design
Variables:
IV: Model- live, filmed or cartoon
DV: Level of aggression displayed
Procedure: (same as original experiment)
Children randomly allocated to one of four conditions:
1. Live aggression: Watched adult aggress towards Bobo doll
2. Filmed realistic aggression: Watched the same behaviour displayed on a screen
3. Cartoon aggression: On a TV watched a model dressed as a black cat perform same
aggressive behaviours towards a Bobo doll
4. Control group: No aggression
Findings:
All 3 experimental group displayed aggression: (mean aggressive acts)
- Live: 83
- Filmed realistic: 92
- Cartoon: 99
- Control: 54
Conclusion:
Exposure to live or filmed aggression increases the likelihood of aggression in response to
frustration, even if aggression is modelled by cartoon figure

Bandura (1965) Influence of models’ reinforcement

Aim: Whether reinforcement and punishment of an aggressive model would influence the
aggression displayed by observers (children) in response to frustration
Design: Lab experiment, independent group design
Variables:
IV: Observed consequence for the model
DV: aggression in children
Procedure:
Allocated to one of three conditions, all involving watching a film of an adult aggressive
towards a Bobo doll
 1. Model-rewarded condition: Children saw a second adult praise model for their
aggression and give them a drink and chocolate
2. Model-punished condition: Second adult scolded the model and spanked them with a
magazine
3. No-consequence: Model was neither reinforced nor punished
● Children were deliberately frustrated
● all three groups were later offered attract the rewards to aggress towards the doll
Findings:
● Children in model-punished were significantly less aggressive than the other two
groups
● Introducing the promise of a reward wiped out the difference, increasing the score
significantly for all the groups

Conclusion:
Vicarious punishment reduces imitated aggression. However, reinforcement is more
powerful influence on aggression

Phobias: Explanations
● The two-process model Acquisition and maintenance
○ Mowrer’s (1960) model explains acquisition and maintenance of phobias
○ Phobias can be acquired by classical conditioning and maintained through
operant conditioning
● Acquisition by classical conditioning Phobia object linked to stimulus which naturally
produces fear
○ Classical conditioning of a phobia involves learning to associate NS with
UCS, triggering fear response UCR
○ Through association the NS becomes a CS producing a CR of fear
○ E.G. if a wasp stings you then the painful sting (UCS) is paired with the sight
and sounds of wasps, initially these are NS and become CS provoking CR of
feat
● Maintenance by operant conditioning Negative reinforcement
○ Responses acquired by classical conditioning tend to decline over time
(extinction) but phobias are persistent
○ Reinforcement increases frequency of a behaviour. Negative reinforcement is
involved and when behaviour is rewarded by removal of something
unpleasant
○ Demonstrated by Mowrer who conditioned a rat to develop an avoidance
response to a shock delivered in a cage. Escape was negatively reinforcing
and so an avoidance response was learned
○ When someone with a conditioned phobia responds by avoiding the fear-
provoking stimulus, their anxiety lessens and this negatively reinforces the
avoidance behaviour
● Social Learning of phobias Observation and imitation
○ Observational learning is another way to acquire phobias
○ Demonstrated in infant rhesus monkey who watched adult monkeys
displaying anxiety towards fear-relevant stimuli and infants then acquired fear
of the same stimuli (Cook and Mineka 1989)
 ○ Humans may similarly acquire phobias by imitating fear responses modelled
by other people
○ Kay and Morrison (2004) studied gender differences with phobias, men
(fathers) traditionally display less visible fear than women, and so sons are
less likely to acquire phobias than daughters

Phobias: Treatments
Systematic desensitisation
● Systematic desensitisation
○ A new response to a stimulus is learned by pairing it with the response of
relaxation instead of anxiety (counterconditioning).
○ You can’t be afraid and relaxed at same time so one emotion prevents the
other (reciprocal inhibition)
● Anxiety hierarchy
○ Constructed by a client and therapist
○ A list of situations related to phobic stimulus arranged in order from least to
most frightening
● Relaxation
○ Therapist teaches client to relax deeply e.g. breathing exercises, meditation
○ Or using drugs
● Exposure
○ Client is exposed to phobic stimuli in several sessions, starting at the bottom
of hierarchy. When they stay relaxed in presence of lower levels they move
up the hierarchy
○ Treatment is successful when client can stay relaxed in situations high on
anxiety hierarchy
+ Gilroy (2003) showed that SD is effective in treatment of specific phobias. She did
this by comparing clients receiving SD for spider phobia with a control group. At 3
months and 33 months after treatment the SD group was less fearful than the control
group.

Flooding
● Flooding
○ Client is exposed immediately to full phobic stimulus
○ Sessions are typically longer than for SD (2-3h). Sometimes only one long
session is needed
● How Flooding works Extinction
○ Flooding stops phobic responses because client cannot avoid the phobic
stimulus
○ Process is extinction
● Ethical safeguards
○ Flooding is not unethical but is unpleasant so it’s important that clients give
fully informed consent and that they’re fully prepared before flooding session

Watson and Rayner (1920): Little Albert

Aim: Demonstrate that simple emotional responses such as fear can be acquired through a
process of classical conditioning
Design: n=1 experiment
Variables:
IV: pairing of loud noise (UCS) with sight of rat (NS)
DV: fear response
Procedure:
● At start Albert showed no fear response to white rabbits, other animals and objects
● His response to loud noise was tested by hitting a steel bar with a hammer

Session 1: Taken to the lab and presented with a rat. When he reached for rat, bar was
struck loudly
Session 2: 1 week later, exposed 5x to rat paired with loud noise
Session 3: 5 days later, responses to rats and objects tested
Session 4: 5 days later, put into a lecture room, to test in a new environment, with 4 people
and placed on table and responses assessed again
Session 5: Tested again one month later with santa mask, rabbit, rat, dog, block and fur coat
Findings:
Baseline: No fear except for loud noise which startled him (UCR)
Session 1: Reacted to noise and cried
Session 2: Cautious to rat (pulled away/didn’t touch). After further conditioning he cried and
ran away
Session 3: Reacted to white furry objects with fear and cried (CR) Mild fear to dog, no fear to
other objects
Session 4/ 5: Fear reactions maintained except when in another environment they were less
extreme
Conclusion:
Watson & Rayner concluded that they had successfully conditioned Albert to fear the white
rat and that his fear response generalised to other white, furry things (with a stronger
response the more closely they resembled the rat) and transferred to other situations

Generalisability
- Findings cannot be generalised to all children. Little Albert was unusual, in that he
didn't show emotion. Other children may have reacted differently and therefore as a
single case study little Albert cannot be said to be representative of all children,
which would be the target population
Reliability
+ It has standardised procedures and it was carefully documented (right down to the
numbers of days and the time of day) and it was filmed. For ethical reasons, the
study hasn’t been replicated, but it could be replicated quite easily.
+ The surviving film of the procedures means we can all view Albert’s responses and
see his fear for ourselves. This is inter-rater reliability.

Application
+ This has led to techniques like Flooding and Systematic Desensitisation.

Validity
+ The study was designed to reduce the impact of extraneous variables and therefore
enhance the internal validity of the study. For example the fact that little Albert was
carefully selected for his emotional stability, making his individual characteristics less
likely to affect results. The controls used in this experimental design make it more
 likely that changes in Albert's Behavior were due to conditioning rather than
extraneous variables
Ethics
- Watching rain or specifically chose little Albert because he was stalled and
unemotional. The study took place before the APA ethical guidelines were produced.
It was clear to Watson and Rayner that they were causing extreme psychological
distress to little Albert at times. The distress caused to little Albert needs to be
weighed against the usefulness of this study and its subsequent impact on our
understanding of phobias and conditioning.

Becker (2012): Eating behaviours following prolonged exposure to television

Aim:
● Find out if the introduction of Western TV into a community that has not previously
experienced it would lead to an increase in unhealthy eating behaviour
● See if more young women would report purging (induced vomiting), dieting and body-
dissatisfaction after the introduction of TV compared to earlier
Design: Independent group design
Variables:
IV: Exposure to western TV
- First sample questioned when TV was introduced in 1995
- Second sample: questioned in 1998
DV: Eating behaviour and general attitudes to eating and body image
Sample:
- Two groups of Fijian schoolgirls in Y11-13
- All around age 17 on average.
- There were 63 participants in 1995 and 65 in 1998.

Procedure:
● The schoolgirls completed the EAT-26 questionnaire.
● Also received a semi-structured interview.
● Both groups also answered questions on television in their home and measures of
height and weight were taken.
● The 1998 group were also asked more detailed questions:
○ Have you ever tried to change your diet in order to change your weight?
○ Do parents or family ever say you should eat more?
○ How important is it to you that you like your weight?
○ Do you ever think you should eat less?
● Girls who scored over 20 on the eat-26 questionnaire had further interviews
Findings:
● Weight didn’t differ between first/second sample
○ BMI’s of 24.5 and 24.9
● TV viewing increased from 41% in 1995 to 71% 1998
● Eat 26 scores increased; 12.7% to scoring over 20 in 1995 to 29.2% in 1998
● No girls reported purging in 1995 to 11.3% in 1998
● In 1998, 74% felt too large or fat and 69% dietted
● Interviews showed girls saw TV characters as role models
Conclusion:
Women in western TV became role models for fijian girls which led to them wanting thinner
bodies than previous norms in Fiji. This led to a ruse in dysfunctional eating attitudes and
behaviour and decline in body image.

Generalisability
- The study involved in unrepresentative Sample therefore findings may not be
generalizable. Generalising findings from Fiji to other populations may cause a
problem because Fiji traditionally has quite distinctive attitudes to body type - Hi BMI
the traditionally considered attractive. Clash between Fijian culture norms and those
portrayed on American TV were much greater than in most countries. Therefore
results may have been affected by culture and may tell us little about the effect of TV
on body image in other countries.

Reliability
+ A strength of the study is the use of reliable procedures to measure eating attitudes
and behaviour. Studies have shown good reliability for the EAT-26. For example,
Juan Rivas (2009) Sounds good internal reliability - a correlation of + 0.9 for each
item and the overall result. This means the differences between the 1995 and 1998
groups were likely due to real changes over time and not simply the unreliability of
the measures.
Application
+ Dr Becker's study had implications for other countries. Education may help young
girls understand the unreal nature of slim models in the media. Studies like this may
justify banning shows that feature particularly thin models, just as Size Zero fashion
models were recently banned at Italian fashion shows.
Validity
- This is a natural experiment where the IV is not being manipulated. Lots of changes
in Fijian society might have gone on (almost certainly were going on) alongside the
introduction of television, so it’s difficult to be sure that TV is causing the changes in
behaviour Dr Becker is reporting.
Ethics
 Clinical Psychology
Diagnosis of mental disorders
● Deviance Deviant behaviours are unusual, undesirable and even bizarre
○ Statistical norms- Used to measure the unusualness of any behaviour
○ Social norms- desirability of behaviour depends on historical context, and the
culture, age and/or gender
○ Failure to conform may lead to negative attention from others and social
exclusion
● Dysfunction Symptoms that distract, confuse or interfere with ability to carry out roles
and responsibilities
○ Psychologists use a variety of objective measures to assess everyday
functioning (e.g. WHODAS II which measures person’s understanding of their
surroundings)
○ Dysfunction can also include trouble getting up, failure to complete tasks and
problems participating in routine activities
● Distress When symptoms cause emotional pain or anxiety
○ Psychological distress may show as physical symptoms, these may be
important for diagnosis
○ Distress could be seen as normal depending on situation
○ A clinician considers the intensity or duration of distress, as well as person’s
level of functioning
○ Quantitative data can be collected using the K10, a 10-item self report scale
focusing on experiences in past weeks
● Danger Careless, hostile or hazardous behaviour jeopardises safety of the person
and/or others
○ Predicting violent behaviour is difficult but a history of aggression makes
another incident more likely
○ In the UK, a person may be detained under the Mental Health Act and be
taken to hospital for treatment without consent
- End up with labels for people with mental health issues. Using ‘danger’ leads people
to equate mental illness with being dangerous. Most people with schizophrenia are
not actually more dangerous than people without diagnosis (Fazel, 2009)
Classification systems: The DSM
● What is the DSM?
○ Describes and classifies symptoms, features and associated risk factors of
over 300 mental and behavioural disorders, used throughout the US
● The DSM-V
Section One
○ Guidance about using new system
Section Two
○ Details of disorders, categorised according to current understanding of
underlying causes and similarities between symptoms
○ Examines symptoms of some disorders differently from previous editions e.g.
the five subtypes of schizophrenia have been removed
Section Three
○ Suggestions for new disorders
○ Includes information about impact of culture on presentation of symptoms and
how symptoms are communicated
● Making a diagnosis using the DSM
○ Based on unstructured (clinical) interviews but many structured interviews are
also available based on symptom lists
○ Diagnosis involves ruling out disorders which do not match person’s
symptoms sufficiently
● How reliability and validity are assessed?
Validity= whether a real disorder has been diagnosed
Reliability= consistency of diagnosis
○ Reliability of the DSM-III checked using Cohen’s Kappa (proportion of people
who get the same diagnosis when assessed and then re-assessed, either
through test-retest reliability or inter-rater reliability).
○ 0.7 is good agreement (Spitzer 2012)
Several types of validity relevant to diagnosis:
○ Descriptive validity- two people with the same diagnosis exhibit similar
symptoms
○ Aetiological validity- two people with the same diagnosis share similar causal
factors
○ Concurrent validity- a clinician uses more than one method or technique to
reach the same diagnosis
○ Predictive validity- accurately predicting outcomes for an individual from their
diagnosis
 + Field trials demonstrated impressive levels of agreement between clinicians.
Schizophrenia had a Kappa value ranging from 0.4 to 0.59 (good). Increasing
reliability
+ Kim-Cohen (2005) demonstrated concurrent validity of conduct disorder (CD).
Specific risk factors e.g. male, low income and parent physiological disorders were
common in many cases suggesting aetiological validity. Predictive validity was found
in 5Y/O with CD were significantly more likely to display behavioural and educational
difficulties aged 7. Increasing validity
- What counts as an acceptable level of agreement has decreased over years. Cooper
(2014) explains DSM-5 task force classified levels as low as 0.2-0.4 as ‘acceptable’.
Regier (2013) found lead reliable diagnosis for MDD at 0.28. Making diagnosis less
reliable

Classification system: The ICD

● What is the ICD?
○ Developed 1893
○ Revised often, current ICD-10 published 1992
○ A multilingual freely available resource, data collected in different countries
can be compared
● Mental disorders and ICD codes
○ Chapter 5 of ICD-10 is ‘Mental and Behavioural Disorders’
○ Each disorders has a code (starting with F), disorders are listed consecutively
and there are 11 sections
■ F20-F29 is Schizophrenia, schizotypal and delusional disorders
■ F20 is subcategory of Schizophrenia
■ F20.0 is paranoid schizophrenia
○ Each section has ‘leftover’ codes, so new disorders can be added without
having to recode
○ System tries to be comprehensive enough to include all known conditions but
also avoid repetition or overlap
● Making a diagnosis using the ICD-10
○ Clinician selects words from interview relating to symptoms
○ Looks up symptoms
○ Uses other symptoms to locate a subcategory
● Improvements to ICD-10
○ Presentation, communication and interpretation of symptoms are shaped by
language and culture, leads to culture bias
 ○ ‘Culture bias’ means clients from one culture could be given a different
diagnosis when diagnosed by clinicians from another culture because of
different cultural norms
○ A review of ICD revealed inconsistencies, ambiguities and overlaps between
disorders
+ Reliability of Schizophrenia was measured using positive predictive value (PPV). This
is the proportion of people who get the same diagnosis when reassessed. For
schizophrenia, PPV increased from 68% in 1989 to 94.2% in 2003. Higher figures for
2003 showed improved reliability and suggest that increased number of disorders
from ICD-9 to ICD-10 has not detracted from reliability of diagnosis
+ Mason (1997) showed diagnosis of schizophrenia using the ICD-10 has good
predictive validity. Study compared different ways of making a diagnosis. ICD-9 and
ICD-10 were reasonably good at predicting disability in 99 people with schizophrenia
13 years later. Shows initial diagnosis was useful and meaningful in terms of its
ability to accurately predict future outcomes.

Schizophrenia: Symptoms and features

● Schizophrenia
○ DSM-5: diagnosis requires at least 2 of 4 key symptoms (one must be
delusions, hallucinations or disorganised speech/thought). Person must have
at least one month of active symptoms and six months of disturbance to
everyday functioning
○ ICD-10: less focus on dysfunction and six months of disturbance is not
necessary. Six subtypes are listed
● Four key symptoms
Positive symptoms: are changes in thoughts and feelings that are “added on” to a person's
experiences
Negative symptoms: are things that are “taken away”
Thought Insertion
○ Person believes their thoughts do not belong to them and have been
implanted by an external source
○ Experience ‘blurring’ between self and otters
Hallucinations
○ Involuntary and vivid perceptual experiences that occur in the absence of
external stimuli
○ Visual, olfactory, somatosensory
○ Auditory are most common
Delusions
○ ‘Fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in the light of conflicting
evidence’ (DSM-5)
○ May relate to everyday life, or may be ‘bizarre’. Many forms such as
persecutory, referential and/or grandiose
Disorganised thought
○ Inferred from speech- derailment (unrelated ideas) or tangentiality (you are
exceptional)
○ Difficult to follow the person's train of thought
○ ‘Word salad’ (random stringing of words) or ‘neologism’ (blending words to
create new words)
○ Only classed as as symptomatic if it leads to dysfunctional communication
● Features
○ Lifetime prevalence of 0.3-0.7%
○ Onset slightly earlier in males (early- to mid-20s) than females (late-20s)
○ Prognosis is variable and hard to predict
○ Episodes of psychosis appear between late adolescence and mid-thirties.
+ Diagnosis can be made with high consistency. Sartorius (1995) found a very high
kappa of 0.86. Suggests descriptors for schizophrenia are sufficiently detailed to
allow clinicians to distinguish this condition from others with shared symptoms and
features

Schizophrenia: Neurotransmitters as an explanation

● Excess dopamine Hyperdopaminergia
○ Antipsychotic drugs chlorpromazine and reserpine helps symptoms but
induce side effects of tremors and muscle rigidity
○ These are symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (low dopamine)- so
schizophrenia was linked to high dopamine. But causes of excess levels
were unclear. Two theories were formed:
■ Low levels of beta hydroxylase (enzyme that breaks down dopamine)
may build up excess dopamine in synapses
■ Proliferation of D2 dopamine receptors on postsynaptic cells may be
responsible for hyperdopaminergic activity
● Dopamine deficiency Hypodopaminergia
○ David (1991)
■ Positive symptoms of schizophrenia may result from excess
dopaminergic activity in the mesolimbic pathway
 ■ Negative symptoms result from hypodopaminergia, a lack of
dopamine activity in mesocortical pathway
● Serotonin and negative symptoms
○ Research now focuses on roles of neurotransmitters (GABA, glutamate and
serotonin)
○ Newer antipsychotic drug (clozapine) binds to D1 and D4 dopamine
receptors, but only weakly to D2 receptors
○ Effectiveness of Clozapine calls into question original dopamine hypothesis
○ Clozapine also binds to serotonin receptors and reduces positive and
negative symptoms of schizophrenia- so negative symptoms may be caused
by irregular serotonergic activity
○ Research focuses on interactions between different neurotransmitters
● Dopamine dysregulation Howes and Kapurs (2009) version
○ Dopamine dysregulation in striatum is common pathway to psychosis
○ Attention should turn to high presynaptic dopamine levels as opposed to
irregularities of D2 receptors
○ Focus on interactions between genetic, environmental and sociocultural
factors
○ Dopamine hypothesis should be softened and viewed as an explanation for
‘psychosis proneness’, not as explanation for schizophrenia
+ Tenn (2003) found rats given nine amphetamine injections over 3 weeks showed
various schizophrenia-like symptoms. Can manifest as stereotypical movements and
social withdrawal. Dopamine antagonists were successful in reversing these effects.
Experimental evidence suggests that increased dopamine levels may be a cause.
- Can’t explain why certain groups are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Veling (2008) showed Moroccan immigrants were more likely to be diagnosed with
schizophrenia than Turkish immigrants. Suggests environmental factors such as
stress may interact with internal neurochemistry and make them more prone to
psychosis.

Schizophrenia: Genetic explanation

● Schizophrenia as a heritable condition
○ Heritability of schizophrenia may be 79% (Hilker 2018) suggesting a large role
for genetic factors in causation
○ Identify responsible genes present in family members diagnosed with
schizophrenia- up to 700 genes identified (Wright 2014)
 ● Gene mutations Schizophrenia can appear without a family history
○ Mutations can result from an environmental factor or error in cell division
○ E.G DiGeorge syndrome is caused by the deletion of 30 genes. Up to 25% of
people with this condition develop schizophrenia
● Candidate genes Specific genes have been identified that are linked to
schizophrenia
COMT gene
○ Link between DiGeorge syndrome and schizophrenia may be due to deletion
of the COMT gene
○ COMT gene creates an enzyme that breaks down neurotransmitters such as
dopamine in prefrontal cortex
○ Deletion would mean poor regulation of dopamine levels resulting in
schizophrenic symptoms
DISC1 gene
○ People with abnormality to gene DISC1 are 1.4 times more likely to develop
schizophrenia than people without (Kim 2012)
○ Codes for creation of GABA, which regulates glutamate and dopamine in
limbic system
● Diathesis-stress model Genes are more likely to create a vulnerability for
schizophrenia than to cause it
○ A person may possess schizophrenia genes but is only triggered by other
biological or environmental effects
○ Original diathesis-stress model saw ‘stress’ as psychological
○ Now ‘stress’ is broader and includes anything that might trigger schizophrenia
(Houston 2008)
+ Gottesman (1991) analysed concordance rates for people of different genetic
similarity. There is a clear relationship between genetic similarity and an increase in
two related individuals both having schizophrenia. Gottesman (1966) found a
concordance rate of 42% for MZ twins and 9% for DZ twins. Shows biology plays a
significant part.

Schizophrenia: Social causation explanation

● Social adversity Failure to meet needs can be stressful
○ Some children grow up in unfavourable environments this makes them
vulnerable to mental health disorders in future.
○ People from lower socioeconomic groups may not be able to access
treatment. This makes their problems worse
 ● Urbanicity Link between urban living and schizophrenia
○ City life is more stressful than rural life
○ Long-term exposure may make a person more vulnerable to having an
episode of schizophrenia
○ High population density makes life more competitive, which may increase
experience of chronic social defeat
● Social Isolation People with schizophrenia withdraw
○ People with schizophrenia find contact with others stressful
○ Self-imposed isolation cuts them off from feedback about what behaviours or
thoughts are inappropriate
● Immigration and minority status Immigrants are at greater risk of schizophrenia than
the general population
○ Research shows greater risk for first- and second-generation immigrants in
many countries
○ Risk decreases as the number of people from the same ethnic background
increases- outgroup status is key. Marginalisation of outgroups may leave
people vulnerable to schizophrenia
○ Veling (2008) suggests schizophrenia may be a reaction against chronic
experience of prejudice and discrimination. Second-generation immigrants
are at greater risk because:
■ Weaker cultural identity
■ Learned to fit in with norms of indigenous society
■ Their beliefs and expectations may be at odds with those of their
parents
○ Creates stress which worsens vulnerability to schizophrenia
+ Veling (2010) found people classed as marginalised (weak national and ethnic
identity) and assimilated (strong national identity but weak ethnic identity) were at
greater risk of schizophrenia than people classed as integrated (strong national and
ethnic identity) or separated (weak national but strong ethnic identity). Suggests a
strong ethnic identity may be a protective factor against schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia: Drug treatment

● First-generation antipsychotics (FGA’s) Chlorpromazine was first antipsychotic
medication
○ Dopamine antagonist- reduces positive symptoms by blocking postsynaptic
dopamine receptors without activating them
○ Most effective FGAs bind to D2 receptors
 ○ 40% of people gain no relief from FGAs and may still experience negative
symptoms (Barlow and Durand 1995)
○ Side effects: tardive dyskinesia- uncontrollable stiff or slow writhing
movements of face and body
● Second-generation antipsychotics (SGA’s)
Clozapine
○ 1960’s, blocks dopamine same way as FGA’s
○ Acts on serotonin and glutamate receptors as an antagonist
○ Reduces positive and negative symptoms
○ Side effect: agranulocytosis- fatal blood condition
Risperidone
○ Recently developed
○ Binds to serotonin and dopamine
○ Binds more strongly to dopamine receptors than clozapine so effective in
smaller doses than most antipsychotics
● Protocol
○ Medication is started quickly for greatest effectiveness
○ In the first week after a psychotic episode, aim is to decrease hostility and
return client to normal functioning
○ Careful monitoring for changes in symptoms and side effects
○ When symptoms subside, a maintenance dose is prescribed:
■ Encourages socialisation, self-care and improves mood
■ Combats relapse- relapse occurs 18-32% who take medication, but in
60-80% who don’t
■ Continued for at least 12 months after remission
● Additional considerations
○ Amphetamines, alcohol, caffeine and nicotine can disrupt effectiveness of
antipsychotic medications
○ Drug treatments often fail to bring relief to people who have experienced
symptoms- Patel 2014, first five years following acute episode can lead to
most significant changes in brain
+ Zhao (2016) conducted a meta analysis comparing 18 antipsychotics and utilising
data from 56 randomised control trials (RCT) with over 10000 people. Found 17 of
antipsychotics tested had significantly lower relapse rates than placebos. Drug
treatments can be helpful, allowing people with schizophrenia to avoid emotional and
financial costs of hospital treatments which may be the only alternative if medication
fails.
 - Turner (2012) claims there is evidence of publication bias towards studies that show
a positive outcome of antipsychotic drugs. Consequence of the effectiveness of
drugs is exaggerated. Could lead to inappropriate treatment decisions that may not
be in the best interest of clients.

Schizophrenia: Cognitive-behavioural treatment

● Irrational thoughts
○ CBT helps clients identify irrational thoughts and change them
○ Managing symptoms- People with schizophrenia lack coping skills, so
vulnerable to stress which may triggers relapse
○ Altering how person thinks can help prevent decompensation (decline from
normal functioning into a psychotic episode)
○ Self-awareness is enhanced by therapist by helping client understand more
about their condition- to recognise specific situations preceding
decompensation and learn to use coping strategies
● Delusions
○ People with schizophrenia typically experience delusions and hallucinations
○ CBT helps make sense of how delusions and hallucinations affect feelings
and behaviour
■ E.g. giving a non-biological explanation can help reduce anxiety
● Behavioural experiments
○ ‘Reality testing’ is a kind of personal experiment:
■ Combats delusions and hallucinations by verbally challenging clients
perceived reality
■ Client ‘tests’ whether delusions are real- often better than trying to talk
client out of false belief
E.g. client who believes someone is trying to harm them could
keep a record of evidence to support this
■ Evidence is discussed to debunk false beliefs- helps client differentiate
between ‘confirmed reality’ and ‘perceived reality’
● Behavioural activation
○ Schizophrenia linked with motivational deficits
○ Can be reduced by rewarding positive behaviour
○ Clients sense of self may also be addressed
+ Support from NICE (2014) conducted a meta analysis of high quality studies about
CBT. Analysis showed that CBT was effective in reducing rehospitalization rates for
up to 18 months for people with schizophrenia and also reduced time spent in
 hospital (8.26 days on average). CBT also reduced symptom severity and improved
psychosocial functioning, both at the end of treatment and 12 months later. Supports
value of CBT treatment.
- Mckenna and Kingdon (2014) compared CBT with routine treatment or a control non-
biological intervention and found CBT was only superior in two out of nine
methodologically rigorous trials. CBT may not be as effective as NICE suggests.

Unipolar depression: Symptoms and features

● Unipolar depression
○ Affective disorder
○ Term ‘unipolar’ distinguishes ‘depression’ from bipolar disorder where
depression alternates with mania
○ DSM and ICD-10 both:
■ Identify single or recurrent depressive episodes
■ Recognise mild, moderate and severe forms
■ Require symptoms to be present for at least two weeks
○ DSM suggests person’s distress and social/occupational functioning must
also be considered
● Affective symptoms Mood
○ Key symptom- depressed mood and loss of interest/pleasure
○ People with depression may feel sad, empty or hopeless and may be tearful
○ Anhedonia- lack of enjoyment or pleasure found in previously enjoyed
activities, events or places
● Bodily symptoms Physical
○ Key symptom- reduced energy levels/ fatigue
○ Knock on effect- depressed people tend to withdraw from work, education
and social life
○ Changes in appetite- change of >5% of body weight in one month
○ Sleep is disrupted nearly everyday- insomnia or hypersomnia
● Cognitive symptoms Thoughts
○ People with depression experience negative thoughts- blame themselves for
events outside their control and feel guilty
○ Lack self-confidence
○ May experience recurrent thoughts of death or suicide
● Behavioural symptoms
○ Fatigue and loss of pleasure and enjoyment can lead to social withdrawal
○ Some show signs of psychomotor retardation or agitation
 ● Features
○ 3.3 people per 100 population prevalence
○ More common in women than in men
○ Comorbid with other mental disorders
○ Linked to physical illnesses- found 23% of women undergoing treatment for
ovarian cancer (Watts 2015)
- Regier (2013) found lead reliable diagnosis for MDD at 0.28. Making diagnosis less
reliable. Lieblich (2015) suggests that this means there was full agreement on only 4-
15% of diagnoses. Research and treatment are undermined if not even highly-trained
and experienced specialists can make reliable diagnoses of depression using DSM-
5.

Unipolar depression: Neurochemical explanation

● Monoamine depletion hypothesis (1965)
Early version
○ Caused by abnormally low levels of monoamine neurotransmitter serotonin.
This regulates brain’s limbic system (amygdala, hypothalamus and
hippocampus)
○ These are brains emotional centres, forming many connections with other
brain areas e.g. frontal cortex
○ Ignored evidence of role of noradrenaline
Later version- permissive hypothesis
○ Caused by imbalance of serotonin and noradrenaline
○ Serotonin levels normally control noradrenaline
○ Abnormally low serotonin ‘permits’ noradrenaline to decrease- outcome is
depression
○ Low serotonin is necessary for depression but not enough on its own
● Receptor sensitivity hypothesis Challenged the monoamine hypothesis is too
simplistic
○ Some drugs had antidepressant properties but did not increase availability of
monoamine neurotransmitters. More to depression than monoamine depletion
○ Depression caused by changes in sensitivity of postsynaptic receptors
○ Normal response is upregulation (Neurons compensate for reduced
stimulation by increasing receptor sensitivity and producing more)
○ Serotonin and noradrenaline postsynaptic receptors even more sensitive to
reduced stimulation than normal
 ● BDNF Hypothesis (Brain-derived neurotrophic factor)
○ BDNF is a chemical which feeds neurons nutrients they need to survive
○ Key role in neural plasticity (Brain forms new synapses)
○ BDNF in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex is abnormally low in people with
depression
○ Close relationship between BDNF level and symptom severity (lower level,
more severe symptoms)
○ Links depression with stress:
■ Gene for BDNF may be switched off under stress
■ Neurons fed by BDNF are vulnerable to atrophy (shrinkage) or
apoptosis (cell death)
■ Both observed in depression
+ Sen (2008) has found a negative correlation between blood serum levels of BDNF
and severity of depressive symptoms. This shows a clear association between BDNF
level and depressive symptoms

Unipolar depression: Cognitive explanation

Faulty/irrational thinking is a symptom of depression but also may be a cause
● Beck’s cognitive explanation (1967)
○ Negative cognitive triad- depressed people make three types of cognitive
error, pessimistic/irrational thoughts about:
➢ The self- believes they’re worthless, unattractive, failure, etc.
Confirms their feelings of low self-esteem
➢ The future- views future in unavoidably negative ways
➢ The world- perceives world as hopeless
○ Faulty cognition stem from childhood, unrealistic expectations and
experiences of loss
● Ellis ABC theory (1962)
○ Rational thinking= thinking that allows us to be happy and free of
psychological pain. Anything else is irrational
A- Activating event
○ Irrational thoughts are triggered by situations
○ Depression occurs when negative external events activate irrational thoughts
and beliefs
B- Beliefs
○ Persons' irrational beliefs about event cause depression, not event itself. For
example:
 ➢ Musterbation: I must be perfect, I must be successful, etc
➢ Utopianism: Life should always be fair
➢ I-can’t-stand-it-itis: something not going perfectly is a major disaster
○ Beliefs are mostly self-defeating, so person interprets event in most negative
way
C- Consequences
○ Irrational beliefs have emotional and behavioural consequences
- Lacks predictive validity. Eysenck (1997) criticised theory because it doesn’t explain
depression, because there is no independent way of establishing existence of
negative schemas. This means theory doesn’t identify risk factors for depression and
cannot predict who is likely to become depressed. Beck’s theory may be a better
explanation of how depressive episodes are triggered and maintained over time
rather than how depression is caused.

Unipolar depression: Drug treatment

Antidepressants work by influencing the activity of serotonin as well as brain circuits
● MAOIS (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) 1950s
After normal neurotransmission and reuptake:
○ Excess neurotransmitter in synapse is removed by an enzyme
○ This ‘degrades’ neurotransmitter into chemical components, which are
reabsorbed by presynaptic neuron
MAOIs:
○ Weaken this mechanism by inhibiting activity of enzyme monoamine oxidase
○ Serotonin remains in synapse because it escaped degradation
○ Raise levels of dopamine and noradrenaline
● SSRIs (Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) 1980s
○ Most common UK antidepressant e.g. Prozac
○ SSRIs interact with fewer compounds than MAOIs
○ Serotonin transporter in synapse pump serotonin back into presynaptic
neuron
○ SSRIs block serotonin transporter, so serotonin cannot be recycled and
remains in synapse
○ Prolongs antidepressant effects of serotonin through repeated binding with
receptors on postsynaptic neuron
● SNRIs (Serotonin- noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors)
○ Newer generation (e.g. duloxetine) developed due to increased
understanding that noradrenaline also regulates mood
 ○ Work in similar way to SSRIs but target noradrenaline as well as serotonin,
inhibiting reuptake of both
● NaSSAs (Noradrenergic and specific serotonergic antidepressants)
○ Useful for people who do not benefit from SSRIs/SNRIs
○ NaSSAs work in two main ways:
➢ Inhibit reuptake of serotonin and noradrenaline (but less than
SSRIs/SNRIs)
➢ Antagonists of serotonin and noradrenaline receptors
○ Seems counterintuitive to increase serotonin by blocking receptors but there
are 14 types of receptor:
➢ NaSSAs block serotonin receptors 5-HT2 and 5-HT3; increasing
activity of key 5-HT1A receptor
➢ NaSSAs also block a noradrenaline receptor
+ Cipriani (2018) reviewed studies of 21 antidepressants. 522 double-blind trials
included. All drugs were found to be more effective than placebo.
- Drug treatments relieve symptoms of depression but do not tackle causes. Effective
antidepressants stabilise dysfunctional serotonin circuits in the brain, but only for as
long as a person takes the drug. Cause of depression can be genetic or
environmental remains. Benefits of drugs are limited to long-term unless a person
continues to take them, which is why psychological therapy is often more useful.

Unipolar depression: Beck’s Cognitive behavioural treatment (CBT)

● CBT
○ Cognitive- corrects faulty cognitions by addressing negative cognitive triad
○ Behaviourist- uses learning theory techniques to help client develop skills to
function effectively
● Assessment
○ Therapist and client assess aspects of clients functioning
○ Questionnaires and interviews measure depression and comorbid disorders
(e.g. anxiety and substance abuse)
○ Therapist and client identify specific issues, list goals for therapy and
construct a plan
○ Key task- identify clients negative thoughts and re-evaluate them to avoid
relapse
● Role of education
○ Client has active role in therapy plan, so needs to clearly understand their
symptoms
 ○ Therapist is valuable sources of information and provides other resources
○ Therapist suggests and explains techniques to help client, who can express
their views from a position of knowledge
● Role of homework
○ Therapy sessions identify and challenge faulty cognition
○ Client carries out plan in real life- homework tests the reality of negative
beliefs
E.g. client writes down details of an event they enjoyed or an occasion
______________________when someone was nice to them
○ Therapist can use written evidence to show client’s negative beliefs are wrong
● Typical session
○ Clients current functioning assessed (e.g. Beck’s depression inventory),
changes since last session can be discussed
○ Discussion moves on to recent homework- what client learned and what
wasn’t completed
○ Client chooses most important issues to discuss
○ Therapist use three questions to challenge clients automatic negative
thoughts (ANTs):
➢ Three questions: What’s the evidence? What are the alternatives? So
what?
➢ Helps client address cognitive distortions
➢ Can explore possibility that ANTs may not be only interpretations of
event
+ Elkin (1989) randomly allocated 239 pps diagnosed with depression to ¼ groups.
CBT was found to be just as effective in reducing symptoms as antidepressant
medication or interpersonal therapy. Shea (1992) found that CBT effectiveness
continued after an 18 month follow-up. Successful treatment for mild to moderate
depression in the short and longer term
- Effectiveness is due to client-therapist relationships. Meehan (2017) suggests that
CBT practitioners have downplayed the importance of this relationship. In their case
study of an adolescent female with depression, they concluded that collaborative
relationships established before using specific techniques encouraged open
communication. Quality of therapeutic relationship probably interacts with therapeutic
techniques and jointly these produce a successful outcome.
Rosenhan 1973: On being sane in insane places
Aim:
- Show psychiatrists are unable to distinguish ‘sane from insane’
- Provide evidence that ‘mental disorders’ lie not within individual but in diagnostic
process
Design: Observation
Variables: Observation so there is no IV or DV
Sample: The participants were the staff and patients in 12 psychiatric hospitals (mental
asylums) in the United States.
Procedure:
Initial study
- Pseudopatients visited 12 psychiatric hospital, hearing a voice saying: ‘empty’,
‘hollow’ and ‘thud’
- All information pseudopatients gave was true. If pseudopatients were asked they said
they were no longer hearing voices
- Once admitted, pseudopatients behaved normally. To be released they had to
behave cooperatively, follow orders and chatted with others. They kept records of
observations
Follow-up study
- Hospitals were told to expect pseudopatients (none were sent).
- Staff rated every patient 1-10 (1= patient was a fake)
Mini-experiment
- Pseudopatients approached staff member in hospital grounds and asked a polite
question about their release
- Responses were compared with a similar encounter between people on Stanford
University campus.
Findings:
Initial study
- All pseudopatients were admitted (seven with schizophrenia and one with bipolar
disorder), most released with schizophrenia in remission
- Length of stay was 7 to 52 days, average of 19
- 30% of real patients were suspicious of pseudopatients
Follow-up study
- 41/193 patients wrongly reported as fake by at least one member of staff
- 23 patients wrongly reported as fake by one psychiatrist
- 19 patients wrongly reported as fake by one psychiatrist and one other staff member
Mini-experiment
- 4% of pseudopatients received an answer from a psychiatrist, 0.5% from a nurse
- 100% people on campus stopped to talk
Conclusion:
- Cannot distinguish the sane from the insane
- Hospital environment created situational factors leading to depersonalisation and
segregation
- Overdiagnosis occurred because clinicians avoided calling a sick person healthy
- In follow-up study, staff erred in the opposite direction to avoid labelling a healthy
person sick
Generalisability
+ Rosenhan made a point of using a range of psychiatric hospitals - private and state-
run, old and new, well-funded and under-funded - from across the United States.
Nevertheless, 12 is a small sample for a country as big as the USA and a few "bad
apples" could have skewed the results of Rosenhan's observations
- There's been a lot of progress in mental health care since the 1970s (indeed,
Rosenhan's study prompted many reforms), so perhaps the results are "time-locked"
and cannot be generalised to psychiatric diagnosis and care today
Reliability
+ The fact that 11 of the 12 diagnoses were consistent - schizophrenia - may prove
diagnoses are reliable after all. If patients present the same symptoms, they receive
the same diagnosis. This goes against Rosenhan's view that diagnosis is unreliable.
- Rosenhan trained his pseudopatients beforehand, but they didn't all follow the same
standardised procedures.
➢ Data from a 9th pseudopatient was not included in Rosenhan’s report
because, among other things, he did not follow procedures.
➢ Another pseudopatient revealed that he was going to become a psychologist
and one of his visitors was a college Psychology professor
➢ Rosenhan explains this as the pseudopatients resisting the effects of
depersonalisation and powerlessness. However, it also suggests they failed
to follow instructions and act consistently.
Application
+ This study had a huge impact on mental health care, not just in America but
worldwide. It caused psychiatric hospitals to review their admission procedures and
how they trained their staff to interact with patients. It started the move away from
dependency on the "chemical straitjacket" of drugs to treat mental health. Today, the
study is a compulsory part of training in psychiatric medicine and nursing.
 + Along with Robert Spitzer's criticisms, this study was a major influence on reforming
the DSM. DSM-III (1980) defined mental illnesses much more carefully, with clear
guidelines for including or excluding people from each classification. For example, in
DSM-III, a hallucination needed to be repeated several times; in DSM-IV (1994)
hearing voices needed to be experienced for over a month before a diagnosis of
schizophrenia can be made and DSM-5 makes this 6 months.
Validity
+ Rosenhan used a covert participant observation and collected both quantitative and
qualitative data. Staff were unaware of pseudopatients so their behaviour would be
normal. Data has high ecological validity enhanced by wealth of data collected by
naturalistic observation
- Psychiatrists admitted pseudopatients on flimsy evidence because they did not
suspect someone would fake symptoms. They would assume anyone seeking
admission must have a good reason. This may challenge validity of some of the
conclusions
- Seymour Ketty (1974) criticised Rosenhan, saying that, because the pseudopatients
were faking an unreal mental condition, it doesn't tell us anything about how people
with genuine mental conditions are diagnosed
Ethics
- The hospital staff were deceived about the pseudopatients’ symptoms being real.
The doctors and nurses in the hospitals could not consent to take part or exercise
their right to withdraw from the study. The other patients in the study had no
possibility of consenting or withdrawing and didn't enter psychiatric hospitals in order
to be in psychology research
+ Rosenhan did protect confidentiality - no staff or hospitals were named.
- A different ethical issue with Rosenhan’s study is that it contributed to a crisis of
public confidence in the American mental health system - which may have prevented
people who genuinely needed help from seeking it.

Carlsson 2000: Network interactions in Schizophrenia- therapeutic implications

Aim:
- To present the current (in 1999) view of the relationship between schizophrenia and
dopaminergic dysfunction.
- Another aim is to explore a rival theory, that of glutamatergic deficiency or
hypoglutamatergia.
Design: Review of evidence
Variables: None
Sample: None
Procedure: None
Findings:
1. Dopamine hypothesis revisited
➢ Evidence still supports this hypothesis- studies using PET scans show
amphetamine enhance psychotic symptoms
➢ Doesn’t apply to all people with schizophrenia
2. Beyond Dopamine
➢ Glutamate- PCP induces schizophrenia-like symptoms, antagonist of NDMA
(glutamate) receptors
➢ Leads to increased dopamine activity
3. Glutamatergic control of dopamine release
➢ Glutamate also affects release of GABA, with opposite effect (reducing
dopamine activity)
➢ Low glutamate (Hypoglutamatergia) may cause an increase or decrease in
dopamine
➢ Normally there is a balance between ‘accelerator’ and ‘brake’ but disruption of
either can produce schizophrenia symptoms
4. Glutamate-dopamine interaction
➢ Hypoglutamatergia in cerebral cortex → negative symptoms
➢ Hypoglutamatergia in basal ganglia → positive symptoms
➢ Dopamine + glutamate pathways interact and affect striatum
5. Thalamic filter
➢ In suggested psychotogenic pathway the thalamus may be ‘turned’ on or off
depending on which pathway is activated
➢ Normally the inhibitory glutamate pathway dominates
6. Comparing two experimental schizophrenia models
a. Hypodopaminergic model → traditional view of dopamine (increase produces
psychotic symptoms) is not challenged by second model, merely extended
b. Hypoglutamatergic model → glutamate can produce an increase or decrease in
dopamine activity, depending on whether the accelerator or brake is applied
➢ Haloperidol tackles hypodopaminergia, M100907 tackles hypoglutamatergia
(affecting GABA via serotonin)
➢ People with different symptoms could be treated with different drugs. Or use
combined drugs to tackle both problems.
7. Is the therapeutic potential exhausted?
 ➢ Understanding mechanisms that moderate dopamine activity may show new
ways to stabilise dopamine system
➢ May avoid some negative effects of current antipsychotics
Conclusion:
- Researchers should start looking into the role of other neurotransmitters, like gaba,
acetylcholine and neuropeptides.
Generalisability
+ The studies he cites in his review - 33 studies in all, 14 that he took part in - will be a
very representative selection of what was going on at the time in his field.
- This study may be "time-locked" if research has moved on since then and it is no
longer representative of the state of scientific ideas today.
Reliability
+ The studies Carlsson et al. cite are all lab experiments, many of them on animals,
which use modern PET or SPECT brain imaging techniques. These techniques are
standardised and replicable, making the research reliable.
- Carlsson cites one study (Laruelle et al.) that was unpublished at the time and
therefore hadn't been peer-reviewed.

Application
+ The main application of this study is in the development of new antipsychotic drugs -
improved dopaminergic drugs that have fewer side-effects based on a better
understanding of dopamine pathways and new atypical drugs that affect other
neurotransmitters like serotonin and glutamate.
Validity

Ethics
Lavarenne 2013: Case study
Aim:
- Describe how therapy group can provide a firm boundary within which individuals can
explore their own fragile ego boundaries
- Group aimed to develop a feeling of connectedness among individuals who are fairly
isolated
Procedure:
- Therapy group met regularly, usually with 10 members
- Four members were absent from this session
- Session not taped or recorded. Coding system recorded emotions expressed as well
as thoughts/behaviours
Findings:
Earl
- Reacted to Brett who gave everyone a christmas card
- His rejection of the gifts might represent his fear of being annihilated (self-
disintegration)
- He responded by discussing an oil project running a pipeline around the world-
interpreted as an attempt to hold the pieces of his self together, symbolising a way to
identify a boundary between Earl’s self and the selves of others
- Running a pipeline around the world is analogous to a boundary around himself-
choice of oil production may relate to a wish to merge his identity with that of his
father (an oil engineer)
Dan
- Had been silent for first six months of attending the group but now didn’t stop talking
- Described out-of-body experience where he was scared he wouldn’t be able to get
his spirit back into his body
- May relate to him coping with demands from his girlfriend clearly defining boundaries
in their relationship
Conclusion:
- Notes show group members were working hard to hold themselves together
- Interactions with others threaten fragile boundaries- they cut off from human relations
in outer world, driving them more and more into an inner world of isolation (Earl)
- This session report showed impressive tolerance, acceptance and containment from
group members
- Enables group members to wrestle with their fragile egos and hopefully foster
psychological growth
Vallentine 2010: Interview
Aim: Investigates usefulness of psychoeducational material as part of group work for
patients in a high security psychiatric hospital
Procedure:
- 42 male patients were referred to the understanding mental illness (UMI) psycho-
educational group
- Judged as either able to gain from further information and/or currently lacked insight
about their condition
- 80% of sample were diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizotypal and delusional
disorders
- Four 20-session UMI groups run over a period of three years
- Patients assessed pre- and post-group:
➢ Clinical outcomes in routine evaluation- outcome measure (CORE-OM)
assesses subjective well-being, problems/symptoms, social/life functioning,
risk to others
➢ Self-concept questionnaire (SCQ) assesses self-esteem
- Also interviewed to assess experience of the group
- Interviews analysed by identifying themes, content analysis
- Another rater repeated the analysis (60% average agreement)
Findings:
- Inferential statistics compared groups- those who complete the UMI (31) and non-
completers- no significant differences found between groups on any of the tests
- CORE-OM: clinically significant changes occurred across all four scales (only one pp
showed reliable change)
- SCQ: more cases of reliable changed and over 50% reported improved self-esteem
- Data from interviews was analysed into four main categories:
1. What pps valued and why?
2. What was helpful about the group
3. Clinical implications identified by patients
4. What was difficult/unhelpful
Conclusion:
- Should further consider absence of reliable changes and negative changes in some
patients
- Qualitative analysis of the interviews showed that patients did value the sense of
hope and empowerment provided
Williams 2013: Does internet-based CBT help people with depression
Aim:
- Investigate impact of 7 day internet-delivery, imagery based cognitive bias
modification (CBM-I) on negative thinking bias, distress and symptoms
- If this intervention would improve effectiveness of online CBT (iCBT)
Sample: Recruited from Australian clinic
- 69 participants
- Randomly allocated to intervention group or wait-list control group
Procedure:
- Time 1 (T1): Baseline measures of depression symptoms, distress, degree of
disability, anxiety, negative thinking ( BD-II= Beck depression Inventory, K10=
Kessler Psychological Distress Scale, ASDT-D= Ambiguous scenarios test-
depression)
- Intervention group: seven days of CBM-I
- WLC: no intervention
- Time 2 (T2): All clients complete questionnaires again
- Intervention group: 10-week iCBT course
- WLC: no intervention
- Time 3 (T3): All clients complete questionnaires again
- WLC group: 10 week iCBT (without initial week of CBM-I)
All clients rated satisfaction with the programme on a five-point scale
- CBM-I (bottom-up):
- Daily 20-minute sessions for one week
- Shown ambiguous scenarios resolved in a positive way to train clients to think
positively about events in everyday life
- I-CBT (top-down):
- Sadness program is six online lessons showcasing ‘best practice CBT’
Findings:
- CBM-I (T2): mean BD-II score dropped 9 points, from T1, for intervention group, 3 for
WLC
- iCBT (T3): mean BD-II score dropped nearly 18 points, from T1, for intervention
group, only 7.5 lower for WLC
- Mean K10 score decreased nearly 12 points, from T1, for intervention group and 4
points for WLC
- Following CBM-I mean AST-D score increased by 0.5 for intervention group and
dropped 0.3 for WLC
Conclusion:
- Brief online CBM-I has significant symptom effect in one week
- Combined intervention significantly reduces depressive symptoms, distress, degree
of disability, anxiety and rumination in people diagnosed with MDD
- Integration of ‘bottom up’ approach (input new ways of thinking) into more traditional
‘top-down’ (start by examining pre-existing negative thinking patterns in effort to
change) them iCBT may be useful addition
Generalisability
 + The sample included a range of 69 people who were both male and female and who
were/weren't taking medication (although more males, more medication in
intervention group) and had other disorders, i.e. not monosymptomatic - so
generalizable to others with depression.
Reliability
+ The study was reliable as it standardised the procedure for all p's except for the
manipulation of the IV (intervention or waiting list) - all p's were measured for
depression, distress & outcome of procedure using same measures, e.g. BDI and
were all asked the same 3 qu's to measure what they thought of the programme.
Application
+ The study has many important applications to real life, as if this type of therapy is
successful/effective, which the study says it is, then treatment can be given to more
people, more immediately, reducing waiting time, saving costs and therefore
reducing suffering and time lost to work/families due to poor mental health.
Validity
- The data was self report data, also means that validity may be compromised, as this
type of data is highly subjective and may simply reflect demand characteristics or
what the p's thought the researchers wanted to hear, as they are motivated
individuals.
Ethics
- The control group had to wait before receiving treatment, which could have
lengthened the time they were suffering. P's may have felt pressured in to taking part
in order to improve their symptoms.
+ The study was sound ethically as all p's gave informed consent, meaning that they
would have been briefed beforehand and not coerced to take part. The study had
been approved by two ethics committees and the waiting list group still received
treatment after the study was finished, so that they weren't disadvantaged.

Child Psychology
Bowlby’s attachment theory
● Why do attachments form?
○ Attachment behaviour evolved because it benefits both babies and parents:
➢ Individuals are more likely to survive and pass on their genes if they’re
well-protected as babies- distant baby ancestors would have been in
 danger if they did not stay close to carer and attachment promotes
proximity
➢ Parents become attached to their babies- parental attachment
behaviour evolved because parents who weren’t good carers were
less reproductively successful
● When and how attachments form
○ Babies form attachments at about six months
○ Any baby not forming an attachment around this age may never be able to
form attachments
○ Babies attach to carers who are most sensitive to their needs
Social releasers
○ Baby-like behaviours and features that elicit caregiving
○ Behaviours have been naturally selected because they lead to survival and
reproductive success
● Monotropy
○ Babies form one special emotional bond to a primary attachment figure (the
person who responds most sensitively to the baby’s needs)
○ Babies form secondary attachments that provide an emotional safety net.
E.G. father, grandparents, etc
● Consequences of attachment
○ Monotropy is important because this relationship forms basis for ‘template’
about what relationships are like- the internal working model:
➢ Short-term: gives child insight for future relationships, creating
expectations about what good relationships are like.
○ Continuity hypothesis- there is continuity from infancy to adulthood in terms of
emotional type:
➢ Individuals who are strongly attached in infancy continue to be socially
and emotionally competent
➢ Babies who are not strongly attached have more social and emotional
difficulties in childhood and adulthood
+ Isabella (1993) observed babies and their mothers interacting at 1, 4 and 9 months of
age, and assessed quality of attachment at one year. Found that most strongly
attached babies had mothers who were more sensitively responsive. Supporting the
importance of sensitivity in formation of a close attachment.
+ Rutter’s ERA study (2011) suggested that forming an attachment beyond the age of
six is true to an extent. Appears less likely attachments will form after this period but
is not impossible. Now we use the term sensitive period to reflect the fact that
 developmental window is one where children are maximally receptive to formation of
certain characteristics.
- Kagan (1984) proposed the temperament hypothesis- the view that a baby's innate
temperament has an important influence on attachment relationship. Some babies
are emotionally difficult and this affects the mothers ability to form a close
relationship. This means way an attachment is formed depends on more than just the
sensitivity of the mother or other caregiver, illustrating that both nature and nurture
matter.

Ainsworth’s work on attachment

● Strange Situation procedure (SSP) Method of
assessing attachment type
○ Structured observation in new room
○ 9 x 9 foot square divided into 16 squares to
help record babies’ movements
○ Eight episodes
○ Key feature- caregiver and stranger
alternatively stay with baby or leave
Enables observation of baby’s response to:
○ Separation from caregiver- babies show
separation anxiety when left alone without
caregiver
○ Reunion with caregiver- babies have characteristic ways of greeting caregiver
on return
○ A stranger- babies respond to an unfamiliar person in different ways
○ Novel environment aims to encourage exploration and thus tests the secure
base concept
● Data collection methods
○ Note what baby does every 15 seconds
○ Use behavioural categories e.g. contact-seeking behaviours
○ Each item scored for intensity from 1 to 7
● Types of attachments Ainsworth (1978)
Insecure-avoidant (Type A) = 22%
➢ High willingness to explore, low stranger anxiety, indifferent separation
anxiety, indifferent to departure or return of caregiver
➢ May develop due to caregiver insensitivity- quiet baby
Secure (Type B) = 66%
 ➢ Low separation anxiety and some stranger anxiety
➢ Reunion behaviour was enthusiastic, used caregiver as a secure base
from which to explore
Insecure-resistant (Type C) = 12%
➢ High stranger anxiety, high separation anxiety and low willingness to
explore
➢ Reunion behaviour was angry resistance to being picked up, but also
trying other means to maintain proximity

Frequency Explore Stranger Separatio Reunion

in children anxiety n anxiety

A I.avoidant 22% High Low Low Indifferent

B Secure 66% Secure Some Low Enthusiastic

C I resistant 12% Low High High Angry

- There are more types of attachments. Main and Solomon (1990) analysed over 200
SSP videotapes and proposed a fourth type called insecure-disorganised (Type D),
characterised by lack of consistent patterns of social behaviour. Such babies lack a
coherent strategy for dealing with stress of separation. A fifth type called
disinhibited attachment characteristic of children who have experienced severe
privation. Initial research may have oversimplified a complex situation and lacked
validity.
- Main and Weston (1981) found that the SSP doesn’t measure what it aims to
measure i.e low internal validity. SSP aims to measure attachment type of one child
but really measures quality of one particular relationship. Main and Weston found
classification of attachment type depended on which parent a baby was with.
Attachment type may not be valid because we are measuring it as one relationship
rather than a personal characteristic lodged in an individual.

Research on deprivation
Short-term effects
● Protest-despair-detachment model (PDD) Robertson and Bowlby 1952
○ Child’s responses to separation changed over time:
➢ Protest- child’s initial response is acute distress. Behaviour directed at
getting a caregiver to return. Lasting hours or weeks
 ➢ Despair- child is less active, cries, rocks for self-comfort. Quietness
sometimes misinterpreted as a sign that the distress is over, but
actually it signals hopelessness
➢ Detachment- child welcomes attention of others, sociable. Apparent
well-being is superficial as the child does not show normal greeting if a
caregiver visits
Long-term effects
● Maternal deprivation hypothesis (MDH) Bowlby 1953
○ Children need ‘warm, intimate and continuous relationship’ with mother (or
permanent mother-substitute) for continuing normal mental health
○ Critical period for effects of deprivation:
➢ Inevitable negative effects before the age of about two ½ years
➢ Continuing risk up to 5 years
○ Long-term consequence of deprivation is vulnerability to mental health
problems
➢ Bowlby’s 44 thieves study- children who experienced prolonged
separations developed mental health issues
● Reducing negative effects
○ Providing a substitute ‘mother’ can compensate for loss of emotional care
○ Loss of maternal care is sometimes unavoidable
○ In childcare situations the aim is to provide secondary attachment figures
○ Robertson and Robertson (1967-1973) demonstrated how substitute care is
beneficial:
➢ Cared for young children in their own home while the children’s
mothers were in hospital
➢ Showed there were fewer ill effects from separation if good quality
substitute care was provided
➢ Separation does not necessarily result in emotional deprivation if
substitute emotional care is provided- it is emotional deprivation that
can cause long-term harm

Research on Privation
● Case study of Privation: Czech twins (Koluchova 1991)
○ Spent first seven years locked up by a stepmother
○ When they were discovered they couldn’t talk and were then fostered by two
loving sisters
 ○ Twins recovered and had good relationships with their foster family and their
own children
● Rutter’s English and Romanian Adoptees (ERA) study (Rutter 2011)
○ Study of 165 Romanian orphans since early 1990s:
➢ Spent early lives in Romanian institutions with almost no emotional
care, then adopted in England
➢ Physical, cognitive and social development tested at adoption, 4, 6,
11, 15 and early adulthood.
○ Control group of 52 English children who hadn’t lived in institutions and were
adopted before six months of age
➢ Romanian adoptees were smaller than controls, weighed less and
classified as mentally retarded
➢ By age 4, almost all Romanian babies adopted before six months had
caught up with British adoptees
➢ Later follow-ups confirmed that significant deficits remained in some
children adopted after six months
● Effects of Privation
Disinhibited attachment
➢ Form of insecure attachment- shown by many Romanian orphans
adopted after six months
➢ Such children treat near-strangers with inappropriate familiarity and
may be attention-seeking
Physical underdevelopment
➢ Children in institutional care are usually physically small
➢ Lack of emotional care is cause of deprivation dwarfism
Poor parenting
➢ Quinton (1984) compared 50 women brought up in children’s homes
with 50 women brought up at home
➢ Ex-constitutional women (by their 20s) experienced extreme
difficulties acting as parents
● Can the negative effects be reversed? Yes
○ Some Romanian adoptees recovered- negative effects can be reversed if
good emotional and physical care is provided
○ Applies mainly to those adoptees before six months (Critical age)
○ Recovery for older adoptees is possible is a child has innate resilience or
quality of care is good
Research into day care
● Kinds of day care research studies
○ Violato and Russell (2000) conducted a meta-analysis of 88 studies:
➢ Day care for over 20 hours per week had a negative effect on social
development, attachment and aggression
➢ But studies were all short-term
○ Longitudinal studies in the 1990s started to examine effects of day care over
long term:
➢ NICHD study in US included 1394 families over 16 years
➢ EPPE study in UK followed 3000 children from different social
backgrounds from age 3 to 7
➢ Both compared children in daycare with those receiving parental care
● Disadvantages for the child May create emotional deprivation with negative effect on
attachment
○ Disobedience and aggression- the longer a 5-year-old spent in daycare, the
more adults rated them as disobedient/aggression (NICHD 2003)
○ Aggression- link remained between daycare and aggression in same children
at end of primary (Belsky 2007)
○ Behaviour problems are tree time more likely in children in full-time daycare
than those cared for by mothers at home (NICHD 2003)
● Advantages for the child Day care may help develop social and intellectual skills
○ Independence and sociability- increased in children who had attended
daycare (EPPE, Sylva 2004)
○ Number of friends- positively correlated with time in full-time daycare once
children went to school (Field 1991)
○ Cognitive skills- boosted in US head start preschool care so disadvantaged
children start school on an even footing
➢ Head start children had IQ gains of 10 points in first year, which
usually disappeared (Zigler and Styfco 1993)
➢ Long term effects were observed- more likely to get a high school
certificate
● Good quality day care
○ Key factors of good quality day-care:
➢ Good staff-to-child ratio, 1:3 for babies and 1:5 for older children
➢ Staff should be given responsibility for individual children so they can
become secondary attachment figures
 ➢ Staff should be trained and encouraged to stay in their job to reduce
staff turnover
○ Li (2013) found high quality of daycare included warmth and sensitivity
cognitive stimulation, encouraging greater exploration and being less
emotionally detached

Cross-cultural research
● Cultural similarities- Nature
○ Bowlby proposed attachment behaviours are naturally selected
○ We would expect them to be genetically determined and universal.
● Research evidence
○ Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg (1988) found cross-cultural similarity in
attachment types around world
○ Meta analysis by Cassiba (2013) also found similarities in comparison of
Italian and US samples
○ Tronick (1992) supports this:
➢ Efé babies were looked after and breastfed by different women but
usually slept with their own mother
➢ Babies still showed one primary attachment (same in the UK)
➢ Forming primary attachment is a universal behaviour even with
multiple carers
● Cultural differences- Nurture
○ Different cultures often have different child-rearing practices
○ Cultural differences in attachment behaviours might lead to differences in
adult behaviour
● Research evidence
○ Takahashi (1990) studied 60 middle class Japanese babies/mothers
➢ Secure attachment rates similar to Ainsworth but Japanese babies
showed more insecure-resistant attachment (32%)
➢ Japanese babies particularly distressed when left alone
➢ Japanese babies are rarely separated from their mothers physical
closeness develops a sense of oneness
➢ Western parents encourage babies to be more separated
○ Grossmann and Grossmann (1990) studied infants and families in Germany:
➢ Northern German babies had greater tendency to be classed as
insecure-avoidant in SSP
➢ German culture encourages distance between parents and children
 ➢ Attachments in southern Germany more similar to US samples
- Indigenous researchers used tools developed in Western world, an imposed etic.
Both Grossmann and Takahashi used SSP to assess attachment. Various
assumptions underlie this technique which make it invalid in other cultures. A child
who plays happily at a distance from his/her attachment figure is judged as securely
attached- but in Japanese children this is not a sign of a ‘normal’ attachment
behaviour. This means German and Japanese children may have appeared
insecurely attached but weren’t.

Autism: Features
● Autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
○ Two broad categories of symptoms considered for diagnosis of ASD:
➢ Social communication difficulties
➢ Repetitive behaviours
● Social communication difficulties
Social-emotional reciprocity deficits
➢ May not use communication to share interests or emotions or initiate
interactions
➢ Lack back-and-forth of everyday communication
Nonverbal communication deficits
➢ Use nonverbal signals inappropriately
➢ Facial expressions can be limited or exaggerated, gestures may be
used in wrong contexts
➢ Mismatch between facial expressions and tone of voice
Problems developing and maintaining relationships
➢ Lack understanding that other people have minds, so have trouble
seeing world from another’s viewpoint
➢ Unaware of social norms
➢ Lack of understanding means difficulty meaning friends
● Restricted and repetitive behaviours
Repetitive behaviours
➢ Use language unusually. E.G. Echolalia
➢ Physical movements can be repetitive
➢ Use objects over and over again in same restricted ways
Routines and rituals
➢ Stick inflexibly to routines
➢ Use verbal rituals
 ➢ Can be resistant to change and variations in routines
Unusual reactions to sensory input
➢ Find touch aversive so try to avoid it
➢ Obsessively interested in movement of objects, looking at them for
long periods of time
➢ First response to an object may be to lick or sniff it
➢ Easily distressed by stimuli they’re not used to yet and may appear
indifferent to pain

Autism: Amygdala Dysfunction explanation

● Amygdala
○ One amygdala in each brain hemisphere
○ Interconnected with other structures and regions e.g. hypothalamus,
prefrontal cortex
○ Amygdala has powerful influence through these connections on behaviours
associated with motivation, emotion and social interaction
● Amygdala development and ASD
○ Amygdala development differs between children with and without ASD
➢ Amygdala of children with ASD is 6-9% larger from two years of age
than in children without a diagnosis of ASD
➢ As children with ASD get older; volume growth stalls
➢ Continues in children with ASD may be partly responsible for any
abnormal neural organisation and impaired functioning of amygdala
○ Early development in ASD may be partly responsible for any abnormal neural
organisation and impaired functioning of amygdala
● Link between frontal cortex and amygdala
○ Amygdala has a central role in influencing social behaviour
○ Baron-Cohen (2000) applied this to ASD:
➢ Amygdala has neural connections with frontal/prefrontal cortex
➢ Abnormal amygdala development in childhood affects operation of
these parts of brain
➢ Key cause of social and behavioural deficits in ASD
● Role of amygdala in impaired social processing
○ People with ASD do not fully understand emotional expressions of other
○ Baron-Cohen (1999) showed this is due to amygdala-dysfunction impairing
social processing:
➢ Gave participants (with and without ASD) ‘eyes test’
 ➢ People with ASD found it hard to choose correct description of each
expression from choice of two
➢ fMRI scans showed, relative to controls, people with ASD had
underactivity in left amygdala
+ Kennedy (2009) studied the famous case of SM. She didn’t have ASD but a rare
genetic disorder which impaired functioning of her amygdala. Her preferred personal
space distance for social interaction was about half of that matched control
participants. Supports theory because it shows amygdala dysfunction is associated
with social deficits that are similar to those found in ASD.
- Dysfunction explanation risks oversimplifying the brain's role in ASD. Paul (2010)
studied two women who experienced lesions to the left and right amygdala. Damage
was limited to amygdala and didn’t affect surrounding areas. Women showed signs
of impaired social behaviour, but not to the extent found in ASD. Amygdala
dysfunction is not enough to fully account for ASD symptoms on its own.

Autism: Theory of Mind

● Theory of Mind
○ Understanding other people’s internal mental states means that we can
interpret and predict their behaviour- when we understand this we possess a
Theory of Mind
➢ Recognition that others have thoughts, emotions and intentions of
their own
➢ Infer people’s mental states from their behaviour
○ This ability is impaired in ASD (Baron-Cohen 1995):
➢ People with ASD have ‘mind blindness’, a reduced ability to
understand internal mental states of other people
➢ Dysfunctional ToM is a central deficit of ASD, accounting for social
and communication impairments
● Foundations of a ToM
○ Two abilities:
➢ Distinguish between physical and mental things
➢ Distinguish between appearance and reality
○ Physical vs Mental
➢ Child listens to story about two characters
➢ One holds glass of pop (Physical) and other thinks about glass of pop
(Mental)
➢ Child answers questions about what each character can do
 ➢ Neurotypical four-year-old finds this easy but children with ASD find it
difficult
○ Appearance vs reality
➢ Neurotypical four-year-old usually know that an object that looks like
one thing can really be something else
➢ Children with ASD may not always grasp that an object’s appearance
and its real nature are not always the same
● Testing ToM deficits
○ Children listen to Sally-Anne story and are
asked questions that test ToM e.g. Where
will Sally look for her marble?
○ Correct answer (in basket) reflects
understanding that another person can
hold a different view of the world
○ Baron-Cohen (1985) tested three groups
of children:
➢ Neurotypical four-year-olds - 85%
correct
➢ Children with Down syndrome -
86% correct
➢ Children with ASD - 20% correct
○ Conclusion- processing tasks that require
a ToM are hard for people with ASD, these
skills are independent of intelligence
● Baron-Cohen (2001) used revised ‘eyes test’ to assess ToM further. Adults with ASD
performed worse than controls, suggesting an impaired ability to infer emotional
states from facial expressions. Finding supports validity of ToM deficit as a features
of ASD, especially given that task didn’t depend on language abilities
- ToM dysfunction could simply be a symptom of ASD. For example, a neurobiological
impairment could be the underlying cause of ToM deficit and thus cause of ASD.
Ultimate cause could be genetic. ToM may not explain a great deal about ASD, at
least not without involving other biological mechanisms

Autism: Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) therapy

● PECS Bondy and Frost (1985)
○ Therapy used for people with limited or no vocal speech, to develop functional
communication
 ○ Based on APA using behaviourist principles to improve social behaviour
○ Children with ASD usually do not initiate conversation, have few opportunities
for communication behaviour to be reinforced
○ PECS help the child make first move in communication rather than simply
responding to others
● PECS protocol
Pre-programme preparation
○ Discover which objects and activities the child is interested in
○ Picture cards created for each object
Stage 1 Physical Exchange
○ Teacher shows object
○ Another adult behind the child prompts child to pick up picture of object
○ Picture exchange, facilitator helps child hand card over
○ Teacher responds by saying ‘ball’ and gives object to child- positively
reinforcing
○ Process repeated with different objects, leading to generalisation
Stage 2 Increasing independence, distance and persistence
○ PECS less structured- pictures arranged in binder
Stage 3 Learning to discriminate
○ Range of pictures in book becomes wider
Stage 4 Sentence structure
○ Child builds sentences by placing pictures on ‘sentence strip’
Stage 5 Answering direct questions
○ Child learns to construct and exchange sentence strip in response to
questions such as ‘What do you want?’
Stage 6 Commenting
○ Question expanded to include social ones- child can comment on
experiences
+ Christy (2002) found that three boys with ASD made more spontaneous speech
utterances after PECS training than before (e.g. one boy went from 28% to 100%).
Eye contact and joint attention also increased significantly. Support claims that PECS
helps children with ASD acquire spontaneous speech
- Flippin (2010) conducted a meta-analysis that included eight experiments and three
group studies in their analysis. They concluded that PECS is fairly effective in
improving communication in children with ASD. But there was no evidence that
improvements were maintained over time or generalised across situations. Suggest
PECS has limited application.
Autism: Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention (EIBI) therapy
● EIBI
○ Evidence based
○ Early- therapy for children under 5, greatest success under 2 year
○ Intensive- highly structures, between 20-50 hours/week, 1:1 therapy
○ Focused on behaviour- based on ABA, uses behaviourist techniques to
replace unwanted behaviours with desirable behaviours
● Elements of EIBI Various types, but share several features
○ Personnel
➢ Sessions delivered by a trained behaviour therapist and programme
supervised by qualified professional
➢ Parents become closely involved with day-to-day application of EIBI
○ Target behaviours/goals are communication/language development, social
interaction, self-care
○ Enables generalisation- uses strategies to let child practise learned skills in
new environments outside home and classroom
● Stages of EIBI
Stage 1 Establish cooperation and reduce tantrums
○ Therapist makes simple requests and reinforces child’s cooperative behaviour
Stage 2 Foundational skills
○ Several skills are developed, from simple to more complex
○ Therapist models behaviours for child to imitate including gross and fine
movements
○ Child imitates facial expressions and develops play skills
Stage 3 Early communicative language
○ Receptive language is reinforced, beginning with ability to follow instructions
and eventually identify objects, people and behaviours
Stage 4 Grammatical language/ Early socialisation
○ Focus switches to expressive language, reinforcing those behaviours that turn
thoughts into grammatically-correct sentences
○ Self-care skills are also developed
+ Reichow (2012) conducted a meta analysis of five studies all including control group
to compare outcomes. Children with ASD who received EIBI saw significantly greater
improvements than controls in IQ, receptive language, expressive language, daily
communication skills, socialisation and self-care skills. EIBI is effective therapy for
some children with ASD
- Success of EIBI may be due to factors not specific to therapy itself. Boucher (2009)
identified four such factors- the intensity of therapy, its early implementation, its
 highly-structured nature and family involvement. These are independent of specific
behaviourist techniques used in EIBI. Factors found in any form of successful
therapy. Suggests there is nothing special about this therapy that explains its
effectiveness.

Van Ijzendoorn and Kroonenberg 1988: Cross-cultural patterns of attachment

Aim:
- See if patterns of attachment are better understood of a large data set is examined,
not just individual smaller samples
- Look at attachment differences between cultures (intercultural) and within cultures
(Intracultural)
Design: Meta analysis
Procedure:
- Meta-analysis of 32 studies that used SSP to classify mother-infant attachment
- Eight different countries, 1990 SSP classifications
- Exclusions: studies with overlapping samples, special groups e.g twins, children
older than 24 months
Findings:
- Type B (secure) was modal classification in all
except one german sample
- Samples were examined to see if there were
significant deviations in frequency of particular
classification:
- Fewer Type C (insecure-resistant) and
more Type A (insecure-avoidant) in four
European countries (Britain, Sweden,
Netherlands, Germany) than in average
of all sample
- Opposite was true for Israel and Japan
- Intercultural and intracultural differences
- Significant intercultural differences
- Significant intracultural differences
- Most significant feature was intracultural variation was 1.5 times the
intercultural variation
- Similarities and differences
- Overall US sample was near the global centre but US sample U7 was more
like the Japanese sample J1
- Israel and Japanese samples had similar profiles and were different from
Great Britain and Sweden
Conclusion:
- Intracultural differences were quite considerable
- Same researchers often obtained data within each country, so differences were not
due to procedural variations
- Universal high levels of type B might suggest attachment is innate and biological
process
- Similarity may be explained by global mass media- TV and books that advocate
particular parenting styles
Generalisability
+ Using a larger sample across different countries and cultures increases the
representativeness of data. They reduce the impact of anomalous findings caused by
poor methodology. Therefore, this study provides a useful benchmark of a global
Sample of ps used in meta-analysis that may not be representative of all infant
attachments from specific culture. e.g. meta-analysis included 18 research studies
from the USA but only one from the UK and China. It is over simplistic to view
countries such as Uk as one culture as within society there are many which may
have different influences on attachment- demonstrated by fact there was 1.5 variation
within cultures than between. means the findings may not reflect the true pattern of
attachment in each culture studied.
Reliability
+ Used the SSP which is a standardised process.
- One weakness of the study is that it is ethnocentric. In the meta analysis, all of them
used SSP. This procedure was created by Mary Ainsworth and was based on an
american sample meaning its an american tool designed to measure attachments in
a western culture. It would be unfair to use it in a non western society as it'll make
them look deficient.
Application
+ One strength of this study is that it has RWA and can be applied to daycare. Secure
attachments were the most common in all but Germany. Insecure avoidant was more
common in western cultures but in non western cultures insecure resistant was more
common. This study teaches us that day care providers should adapt the way they
look after a child based on the child's culture, otherwise the child may get confused
as they're being treated differently at home.
Validity
- Meaning of SSP differs across cultures
- Imposed etic (individualist, independence assumption)
- SSP may have been used differently in different studies (Sagi and Lewkowicz, 1987)
- Country is not culture (e.g. urban, rural, university, industrial etc)
Ethics
+ No ethical issues - meta-analysis uses secondary data so they didn't engage with
any pp's, and the pp's had previously given permission, so no further permission is
needed

Gagnon-Oosterwaal 2012: Pre-adoption adversity and behaviour problems

Aim:
- Build on previous research into effects of early deprivation on later behaviour
problems in Internationally adopted (IA) children
- Test accuracy of child self-report to measure internalising (focused on oneself e.g.
keep problems to self) and externalising (difficulties directed towards others)
problems
Design: Longitudinal
Sample:
95 adopted children
- 69 girls, 26 boys
- East-asian countries, Russia
- 92% adopted from orphanages, 8% from foster care
95 mothers
- 44.4 mean age
- 15 year schooling
- 93.6% income over 40K Canadian
Comparison group
- 91 french speaking kids from normal montreal schools
- Mean age 7 years 8 months
- Mothers all had college degrees
Procedure:
- Children's health and developmental status measured at arrival- medical and
anthropometric measures. Bayley scales assessed mental and psychomotor
development
- Dominic Interactive (DI)- computerised pictorial self-report to assess most frequent
internalising/ externalising symptoms in children at 6-11 years
- Child Behaviour Checklist (CBCL)- 118 item survey on internalising/ externalising
problems. Parents response on 3-point scale (not true, sometimes, often)
Findings:
- IA children reported more internalising problems than non adopted peers. No group
differences for externalising
- IA children reported more symptoms of specific phobia than non-adopted peers
- Positive correlation between mothers and children’s reports but only significant for
externalising problems
- Significant correlations between developmental weight/ height ratio and depression,
specific phobias and conduct disorder
Conclusion:
- IA children are well-adjusted when adopted to well-off families
- Use of child self-report is important for studying internalising problems as mothers
reports are only accurate for externalising
- Height and weight may be significant risk factors because they’re associated with
malnutrition

Generalisability
- Mainly from china but used many cultures
- Age of sample - only differed in one area - phobias. this is something that is with you
early on, may be too young to get real symptoms
Reliability

Application
+ Can be applied as to why IA shouldn’t happen and can harm the children
Validity
+ Design controlled key variables. Such as samples were matched on various variables
which enhanced validity of findings
- Cultural influences not controlled, e.g. stress of changing country (UNCRC article 21:
international adoption should only happen if no placements in home country)
 - Different problems have different onset (e.g. phobias: early in development).
Samples not same age and too young to detect all problems.
Ethics