holism and reductionism

Question 1

reductionism believes that

Answer 1

behaviour is best understood by breaking it down into its constituent parts

Question 2

holism believes that behaviour is best understood by

Answer 2

analysing the person as a whole and that if you reduce behaviour into consistent parts you will miss something
humanistic psych believes that a persons sense of unified identify is important and a lack of wholeness leads too mental disorders

Question 3

levels of explanation

Answer 3

highest level = how our cultural groups and social groups influence behaviour
middle level = psychological explanations of behaviour
lower level = biological explanations of behaviour

Question 4

biological reductionism reduces

Answer 4

complex phenomena into constituent biological parts such as the action go genes , hormones etc .
it explains mental disorders in this way
for example overactivity of dopamine in the basal ganglia is thought to cause schizophrenia .

Question 5

environmental reductionism
“ stimulus response reductionism “

Answer 5

explained complex phenomena by breaking them down into stimuli response links
ie attachment is explained by pairing UCS of milk and CS mother together to create CR attachment

Question 6

a weakness with reductionism is that by reducing complex phenomena into constituent parts , it might fail to consider how human emotion may be influential for example

Answer 6

the MSM explains the liner process in transforming sensory info in memory but does not account for emotion/anxiety .
the Swedish bank robbery study showed how extreme anxiety led to enhanced recall of a crime

Question 7

a strength and weakness is that biological reductionism has led to drug therapies such as SSRIS , since drug therapies were developed in the 1950s there has been a reduciton in institualisantion giving many the freedom to manage their condition by themselves however

Answer 7

drugs therapies have been criticised for variable success rate and for trading symptoms rather then the cause. someone with depression might be bereaved or seeking asylum thus would benefit from practical help rather than drug therapy.
a more holistic view (higher level) of the persons cultural and social experiences could be more appropriate in this case

Question 8

another weakness is the behavioural approach was developed using non human experiments and critics argue that is

Answer 8

inappropriate to extrapolate the results to humans , thus claiming environmental reductionism may not be accurate .