issues and debates

Question 1

Strength of Holism

Answer 1

Holism has real-life applications when applied to therapy. For example, Carl Rogers and Maslow proposed that people should strive to become self-actualised and are born with a desire to grow, giving patients a leading role in their own recovery. By giving patients unconditional positive regard, humanistic psychologists give them an environment to improve and become authentic to themselves. This means that through a holistic approach, therapy has been improved and contributed to the knowledge of how multiple factors affect behaviour.

Question 2

Weakness of Holism

Answer 2

A limitation of holistic methods is that they are usually subjective, relying heavily on interpretations and qualitative data. This subjectivity can lead to
challenges in establishing the validity of findings. For example, Bowlby’s study of the 44 juvenile thieves assessed children holistically, including interviews
with parents, IQ tests, attitudes towards tests and notes from the psychology support received in the clinic they attended. When analysing the data
retroactively, Bowlby concluded that maternal deprivation was the factor causing delinquent behaviour. However, another researcher could have interpreted
the wealth of data in a different way and focused on the mental health as the factor causing criminal behaviour rather than separation in childhood. Without
exploring one variable at a time, it is impossible to explore causality.

Question 3

strength of reductionism

Answer 3

One strength of reductionism is the ability to break down behaviour into its simplest factors and causes and establish causality. Researchers studied HM who was a severe epileptic. He underwent surgery to remove parts of his hippocampus to treat this. HM retained memories of before the surgery, but could not form new LTM, unable to transfer information from his STM to his LTM. supporting the reductionist model of the MSM and that there were indeed 2 different stores of memory. These phenomena could only be explained by a reductionist hypothesis.

Question 4

Weakness of reductionism