Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura:

Albert Bandura came up with the theory called "Social Cognitive Theory". It focused on the learning that occurs within a social context. It also takes into consideration the fact that people learn from one another, including observational learning, imitation, and modeling. He stated that people can learn by observing the behavior is of others and the outcomes of those behaviors,l learning can occur without a change in behavior, also cognition plays a role in this theory, since social learning theory has become increasingly cognitive in its interpretation of human learning. He also believed that the environment reinforces and punishes modeling The Social learning theory can be considered a bridge or a transition between behaviorist learning theories and cognitive learning theories.


Julian Rotter:

Julian Rotter came up with the theory called "Social Learning Theory". This Theory is derived from the work of Albert Bandura.It stated that the environment is defined as the external stimuli that the individual recognizes and responds to. The theory was based upon five main concepts. The first of these concepts is reinforcement, describes anything that has an influencing effect on occurrence, a type of behavior, or direction. The next concept is reinforcement value, which is the amount of preference that one has for any reinforcement to exist if the various reinforcements were equal.The next concept is psychological situation which is characterized in regards to a person, this allows an individual to categorize based on other specific situations, and also allows a person to differentiate it from others as well.The next concept is expectancy, refers to the probability that an individual has that a specific reinforcement will exist as a certain function of a particular behavior on the individual's part within a certain or various situations. The last of Julian Rotter's major concepts is generalized expectancy, its expectancy that counts for numerous and various situations that are comparable to each other to a certain degree.


Martin Seligman:

Martin Seligman came up with the theory of "Learned Helplessness". Learned Helplessness is seen as a coping mechanism some people employ in order to survive difficult or abusive circumstances. This has also been associated with several different psychological disorders. Depression, anxiety, phobias, shyness and loneliness can all be exacerbated by learned helplessness. Martin came up with this theory by conducting a very cruel experiment on dogs, which included ringing a bell while shocking a restrained dog. He then allowed it to move out of the way and rang the bell again. The dog did not move since it had learned was not that ringing a bell means pain, but that it is useless trying to get away from shocks. He believed that how we attribute the events that occur in our lives has a significant effect on our attitudes and efforts in improving our lot.


Aaron Beck:

Aaron Beck came up with the theory of "Cognitive Behavior". He believed that that one's thoughts and beliefs affect one’s behavior and subsequent actions, that dysfunctional behavior is caused due to dysfunctional thinking, and that thinking is shaped by our beliefs. Our beliefs decide the course of our action. Theorists suggest that depression results from faulty and irrational psychological perception, which cause distorted learning and reasoning. Depression could be a result of a traumatic experience or incapability of adaptive coping skills. Depressive people have a negative perception or belief about themselves and their environment. The more someone has negative thoughts more is the severity of one's depression symptoms.

The Lobotomist

In the video “The Lobotomist” we were explained about the origins of the lobotomy, how was procedure was performed and the consequences this lead to. The neurologist Walter J. Freeman has been coined the name “ The Lobotomist” after performing 3,439 lobotomies in his lifetime. This procedure would begin with the patient being electroshocked in order to subdue the patient, then lifted the patient's eyelid and inserted an ice pick-like instrument called a leucotome through a tear duct. A few taps with a surgical hammer breached the bone, pushed the leucotome about an inch and a half into the frontal lobe of the patient's brain, and moved the sharp tip back and forth. Then he repeated the process with the other eye socket. Through this process they achieved that the tool cut vertically down the side of the cortex of the interhemispherical fissure All cuts were designed to transect the white fibrous matter connecting the cortical tissue of the prefrontal cortex to the thalamus. The leucotome was then withdrawn. Walter J Freeman believed that problems in the brain led to mental disorders. After arriving at St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington on 1924, as the new director he was shocked at the places decline, how people were just thrown together, abused and not taken care. Walter set out to fix this. He realized shock therapy did not get rid of the problem, it just made it less severe. So he decided to be the first doctor in the United States to try Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz’s procedure which involved drilling holes in the patient's head and destroying tissue in the frontal lobes by cutting brain tissue by rotating a retractable wire loop. Moniz was given the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949 for this work. At the beginning Walter along with his colleague and friend James W. Watts performed the first prefrontal leucotomy in the United States in 1936. But they still had a problem with this procedure, it required drilling holes in the scalp, so surgery had to be performed in an operating room by trained neurosurgeons. Walter believed this surgery would be unavailable to those he saw as needing it most such as the patients in state mental hospitals that had no operating rooms, surgeons, or anesthesia and limited budgets. Walter Freeman began to travel around the nation in his own personal van, demonstrating transorbital lobotomy in any hospital that would have him. He even performed a few in hotel rooms, lobotomizing children as young as thirteen for “delinquent behavior” and housewives who had lost their enthusiasm for domestic work. simplify the procedure so that it could be carried out by psychiatrists in mental asylums. His first live patient was a woman name that went through the trans orbital lobotomy was a woman names Helen, she survived the procedure. After the success Walter promoted the procedure to more than 55 hospitals in 23 states. He would set up graphic exhibits and used hand-held clackers to draw audiences. Lobotomies were used on 40,000 to 50,000 Americans between 1936 and the late 1950s. Walter’s criteria was that their symptoms would go away, if they came back he would operate again. Many patients often had to be retaught how to eat and use the bathroom. Relapses were common, and three percent died from the procedure. Many critics were outraged but it was considered in bad taste during this time period to write publicly against it, therefore it would not stop it. Walter lost his medical license at the end of his career when he killed a patient. When a new pharmaceutical options became available it really marked the end of the lobotomy. I believe that Walter Freeman believed that he was doing the right thing , and that he was actually patients deal and freeing them from their mental illness. All though this procedure was not very ethical it was the only thing available to help patients with mental illnesses therefore it was a necessary procedure.



Sources:
http://www.psychosurgery.org/about-lobotomy/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
http://www.mcmanweb.com/lobotomy.html

Bipolar Disorder

Before watching "Boy Interrupted" when i though about bipolar disorder i only though about it being about crazy people who have mood swings that change every minute, i never really understood how serious it was. The documentary was very shocking and sad and i though it was very informative. I felt so bad for Evan's parents because i now see that this is a very distructive condition that also has very fatal consequences for a lot of people. I was also really impressed by Evan's parents in the sense that it must have taken a lot of their part to gather their strength and talk about their son and his suicide in order to prevent and maybe inform people about how serious bipolar disorder is. I can not even imagine how horrible it must be to have such a condition in which you struggle for your life every single day and having a condition that has no cure. I think that the most shocking part of the video was learning that even was obsessed about death and planning his own death when he was just a little boy and i can't imagine how horrible it must have felt for his mother that nobody really believed her what was happening. I really enjoyed the documentary and i feel it opened my eyes to this disorder that i did not really know a lot about.

Internal Assesment- Heuristics: Tversky and Kahneman's

In psychology heuristics are described as simple and efficient rules. That have been coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been used to explain how people make decisions, make judgments, and how they solve problems, when facing problems or when they are presented with incomplete information. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman are two men who proposed the theory that when people are faced with the task of judging probability or frequency, people use a limited number of strategies, (heuristics) in order to simplify these judgments. They suggested that people judge likelihood of events based on how it 'represents' a larger group or similar examples this is now known as representativeness heuristic. They came to the conclusion that this his idea fits with accepted models of learning theory, especially the fact that we tend to categorize things in the memory and store things by association, therefore they are more likely to stereotype. In the another heuristic also know as availability heuristic They based on the idea that when asked to judge probability of an event, we base our judgment on how easy it is to think of relevant examples. In an experiment conducted to test this they presented participants with four lists of names: two lists containing 19 famous women and 20 less famous men, and two lists containing 19 famous men and 20 less famous women. The first group were asked to recall as many names as possible and the second group were asked to estimate which class was more frequent, either famous or less famous. The results were that first, the famous names were most easily recalled compared to the less famous names. Despite the fact that the less famous names were more frequent, the majority of the participants wrongly judged that the famous names appeared more often. Therefore an important factor that emerged from this study proved that the availability heuristic serves as an effective strategy in many situations. Although they lead to accurate judgments, they may also lead to systematic errors especially when it comes to judging frequency. For my experiment we will attempt to use the same idea used by the psychologists and hopefully obtain similar results. We will prepare a list that will each contain a set of names, these names may be either famous people, less famous people or just random names in two columns. Then the participant will be given a sheet of paper and a pencil and asked to recall and write down as many names as they are able to remember. Hopefully by conducting this experiment we will be able to further prove Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman theory.

The Placebo Effect - Is it real or just imagined?

The placebo effect is a huge phenomenon in which patient’s symptoms are alleviated by a non-existent treatment, since the patient believes that they will get better and that the treatment will work. It is almost like healing your body with your mind because you get better since your brain really thinks you are better thanks to the treatment. In H.K Beecher’s study he concluded that 55% of the patients that took the placebo had improvement in their conditions. But when the Institute for Applied Theory and Methodologies in Health Care, in Frieburg, Germany decided to reedo the study done by Beecher they discovered that 66.7 percent of patients conditions inproved naturally and had nothing to do with the placebo, also patients that had the placebo had improvement in their conditions after six days, but they would recover after six days even if they were not given any placebo. Also they found that Beecher stated that patients improved after they were switched form the real medicine to the placebo, but reaserchers found that this was due to the fact that patients were experiencing side effects to the medication. And Beecher did not report the large number of people whos condition worsened due to the placebo, instead he only reported the people whos condition it improved. So in reality there was not evidence of a of the plavebo effect. Some problems experienced with these studies are psychosomatic problems, stress induced and conditioned responses. Although through some studies have concluded that the placebo effect is imaginary, I do believe that it is real. I do think that if in your mind you believe that you are going to get better you will because your mind has the power to influence the rest of your body. After the many videos we watched in class i do believe that there is a lot of evidence to prove that the placebo effect is real. I also believe that religious miracles have more to do with placebos and the power of your mind to heal you than the fact that it is a "miracle".



Sources:
http://www.chiro.org/nutrition/FULL/Debunking_the_Placebo.shtml
http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html

Are All Memories Alike? #2

I think that this was a very interesting article it had a lot of information and it was a very extensive research but i personally do not believe that recolection of memories have anything to do with your culture, or where you live. I think it is racist to think that personally almost as if saying that one culture is more superior because we have a better memory or because we have superior thinking. I think that everything has to do with the way your are raised, or how your family is and interacts with you. Some families are very united and big and like discussing past events and you begin to piece together memories and maybe you come from a family that is not very close and you cant piece together memories and so you don't really know or remember that far back. I think its wrong to say that cultural differences have anything to do.

Are All Memories Alike? #1

First of all it was no surprise reading that women really are better than men in many more things. I truly believe that women are able to remember more specific things such as faces, events , pictures because i think we put more emotion and we are more attached to everything we do un like men. I also believe that there should have been male scientists involved in the experiment. I also believe that women pay more attention to details therefore we are able to remember faces and other things much easier while i believe men are more focused on the big picture. So i think this was a really great article and i think everyone should read :)