debates

Question 1

what are the 5 debates

Answer 1

• mother as primary caregiver
• the reliability of eyewitness testimony
• the use of conditioning to control behaviour of children
• ethics of neuroscience
• relevance of positive psychology

Question 2

what are the 3 debate topics for the behavioural approach?

Answer 2

• conditioning at home
• conditioning at school
• conditioning vulnerable individuals

Question 3

what is a conditioning @ home for?

Answer 3

supernanny Jo Frost brought in the ‘naughty step’ technique to redirect attention from bad behaviour and focus on positive reinforcement for good behaviour. by using the naughty step, children don’t get any attention for their misbehaviour giving them time to reflect on what they did wrong. It’s all about highlighting and praising good behaviour to encourage positive actions

Question 4

what is a conditioning @ home against?

Answer 4

Morris (2014) claims that techniques such as the naughty step have long term emotional effects. children are too young to reflect on their own behaviour and verbalise their feelings they experience from things like the naughty step. without help to understand their feelings the naughty step could have detrimental effects on gaining these skills

Question 5

what is a conditioning @ school for?

Answer 5

education has been a major user of operant conditioning techniques to control the behaviour of children. gold stars, merits, and even house points are positive reinforcers, the aim of which is obviously to reward good behaviour and performance to increase the frequency at which they are seen

Question 6

what is a conditioning @ school against?

Answer 6

a critical issue relates to how rewards may create a form of ‘learned helplessness’. Dweck found that children who were praised for doing good work on a maths test did worse on a later, more difficult test than children who had been told they’re lazy. the second group had learnt persistence whereas the ‘praised’ group gave up easily

Question 7

what is a conditioning vulnerable individuals for?

Answer 7

psychologists like Lovaas used techniques like applied behaviour analysis (ABA) to help children with autism improve their social interactions, language skills and self-care. the therapy involves rewarding desired behaviours initially, then gradually reducing rewards to encourage the child to reach the target behaviour independently. it’s all about shaping behaviour through positive reinforcement

Question 8

what is a conditioning vulnerable individuals against?

Answer 8

critics of the Lovaas method point out that the research supporting it had methodological flaws like not randomly assigning children to control or experimental groups. this raises concerns about the treatment’s effectiveness

Question 9

what are the debates topics for the biological approach?

Answer 9

• detecting criminals
• treating neurological disorders
• enhancing marketing strategies

Question 10

what is a detecting criminals for?

Answer 10

Raine et al. conducted a study of 41 murderers and used PET scans to establish if the brains of violent criminals function in a different way to non-criminals. they found several notable differences in brain activity in regions already linked to violence. this means we are on the brink of being able to identify potentially violent people from a young age due to their distinct levels of brain activity.

Question 11

what is a detecting criminals against?

Answer 11

the ethical issues of this is that it challenges the notions of free will because murderers may not be held accountable for their actions and interventions especially at a young age. Farah argues that if courts use neurological interventions it signals a denial of an individual’s freedom, something that even prisons had not denied previously e.g. the freedom to have your own personality and think your own thoughts.

Question 12

what is a treating neurological disorders for?

Answer 12

Disorders of the brain and nervous system result in more
hospitalisations and lost productivity than any other disease group. In 2007, the World Health Organisation estimated that neurological disorders affect up to one billion people worldwide. Advances in neuroscience could reduce this number e.g. neuroscience has already helped to increase our understanding of the factors involved in the neurological condition Alzheimer’s disease, which is arguably one of the worst diseases imaginable.

Question 13

what is a treating neurological disorders against?

Answer 13

Although neuroscience holds promise to treat disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression or schizophrenia; it could also be used to treat people who are well to perfect them. Is there a need to manipulate natural moods, perceptions and memories and are we trying to ‘play God’? For example it is arguable to whether it is ethically right to tell a child that they need to change their behaviour in order to fit in society

Question 14

what is an enhancing marketing strategies for?

Answer 14

social desirability bias can be avoided using eye tracking equipment which provides objective evidence of what really catches a person’s eye when shopping or watching advertisements. for example, EEG scanning can also be used to analyse neurological responses. One company, Sands Research, used this kind of neuromarketing research when devising the highly successful ad ‘The Force’ (Volkswagen). Improving marketing techniques can aid the economy by stimulating sales and profits.

Question 15

what is an enhancing marketing strategies against?

Answer 15

neuromarketing firms are not currently obliged to abide by ethical codes of practice for example, Nelson found that 5% of the brain scans recorded by marketing firms produced ‘incidental findings’. researchers might see evidence of a brain tumour or some other problem with a person’s brain function. As the researchers are not ‘board-certified’ they are not obliged to follow appropriate ethical protocols such as advising the person of their findings.

Question 16

what are the 3 debates topics for the positive approach?

Answer 16

the relevance of positive psychology in:
- education
- the workplace
- health

Question 17

what is an education for?

Answer 17

the prevalence of depression among young people is shockingly worldwide. nearly 20% of youth experience an episode of depression by the end of high school (Lewinsohn et al). one positive psychology curriculum, the Penn Resiliency Programme was introduced into schools. students on this programme showed reduced symptoms of depression compared to a control group (Gillam et al)

Question 18

what is an education against?

Answer 18

adding positive psychology to the curriculum is likely to mean that other courses have to be dropped. Schools have limited budgets and have many curricular demands; they cannot add positive psychology techniques without subtracting other essential subjects. An editorial in the Financial Times suggested that this means society may end up paying more for students to leave school with fewer academic achievements.

Question 19

what is a workplace for?

Answer 19

Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre found that most people experience ‘flow’ situations more than three times as much at work than during leisure and went on to comment that if workers admitted to themselves that work can be as or more enjoyable than most of their leisure time, they might work more effectively and in the process also improve the quality of their own lives.

Question 20

what is a workplace against?

Answer 20

Although positive psychology may report research findings which support the concept of ‘choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life’, it is not a new idea. Therefore we have to question whether positive psychology in the workplace has really offered us anything more than empirical support for something which much of society already know.

Question 21

what is a health for?

Answer 21

Kubzansky and Thurston’s research followed more than 6,000 men and women aged 25 to 74 for 20 years. She found that those participants with high levels of ‘emotional vitality’ had a reduced risk of coronary heart disease. As a result, medical professionals should potentially look to treat patients with advice about how to increase their happiness, along with other lifestyle advice.

Question 22

what is a health against?

Answer 22

It is difficult to prove a cause and effect relationship between happiness and health. Are people healthy because they are happy or happy because they are healthy? Positive psychology could be a significant influence in the health sector, however, it perhaps isn’t taken as seriously because it has difficulty in conducting research that draws clear cause and effect conclusions.

Question 23

what are the 3 debate topics for the cognitive approach?

Answer 23

• children
• post event information
• role of emotion

Question 24

what is a children for?

Answer 24

The case of Samantha Runnion (2002); Samantha’s friend Sarah, just 5 years old, was able to give police a description of the man and details about his car. They were looking for a Hispanic man with slicked back black hair and a thin black moustache, driving a light green car. Alejandro Avila was arrested and charged with her murder and fitted the description given by Sarah. This shows the accuracy of the eye witness testimony of children and how useful it can be when hunting a criminal in a case such as this. Sarah’s testimony was however only used when backed up by other witnesses.

Question 25

what is a children against?

Answer 25

Linder reports the McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial. The Government spent 7 years and $15 million investigating a case that led to no convictions. Children were asked whether they had been victim to or witnesses crimes such as sexual acts following an accusation by a pupil against their teacher at the school. 400 children were questioned and 150 medically examined. during the court case the children gave bizarre and inconsistent accounts of events at the school.

Question 26

what is a post event information for?

Answer 26

However Loftus showed participants images of a man stealing a red purse from a woman’s bag. Participants were then later given misleading information designed to make them believe the purse was brown (including a statement that outright said that the purse was in fact brown). Nevertheless, 98% of participants recalled the purse as being red.

Question 27

what is a post event information against?

Answer 27

Loftus and Zanni found that 7% of participants that were asked ‘did you see a broken headlight?’ reported seeing one, whereas 17% of those asked ‘did you see the broken headlight?’ reported seeing one. Information post-event (in this case the use of the word the or a) can influence the recollection of an incident and therefore reduce the accuracy of the eye-witness testimony. This suggests that whenever a witness is questioned, either by the police, lawyers, friends etc. their recollection of the actual event may be distorted.

Question 28

what is a role of emotion for?

Answer 28

such laboratory based studies might not reflect what happens in real-life events as some studies have found that emotional arousal may actually enhance the accuracy of memory. Christianson and Hubinette found when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies, those witnesses who had been threatened in some way were more accurate in their recall and remembered more details than those who had been onlookers and less emotionally aroused. This continued to be true even 15 months later.

Question 29

what is a role of emotion against?

Answer 29

Loftus also reported on a phenomenon known as the ‘weapon effect’ which suggests that in violent crimes arousal may focus the witness on more central details of the attack than the more peripheral details. In an experiment to test this, pps were asked to sit outside a laboratory where they thought they were hearing genuine exchanges between people inside the laboratory. In one condition they heard an amicable discussion about an equipment failure. A man with greasy hands then came out of the laboratory holding a pen. In the other condition, they heard a hostile discussion, followed by the sound of breaking glass and
overturned furniture. A man then emerged from the lab holding a knife covered in blood. Pps were then given 50 photos and asked to identify the man who had come out of the lab. People who had witnessed the peaceful scene were more accurate in recognising the man (49%) than people who had
witnessed the more violent scene (33%).