Psychology the factors of Smoking
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Introduction
Psychology Assignment 1 Describe & discuss how each psychological perspective explains smoking using empirical evidence to support your answer. Introduction This assignment is to explain the effects of smoking in each of the five different perspectives. Psychodynamic, Behaviourist, Humanistic, Cognitive and Biological perspective. Psychodynamic Perspective The oral stage is the first of Freud's psychosexual stages, in which it explains the infant's development during the first year of their life, during which the infant focuses on satisfying hunger orally. Sigmund Freud believed that during this stage of development the person can become either fixated/relative in the oral stage of development, the mouth is the focus of the libido. In which an infant's sexual pleasure and comfort centres on sucking, chewing, biting and accepting things into the mouth during this psychodynamic stage. Infants are naturally and adapted in the oral stage from birth, but if the mother weaned too early or too late; this may fail to be resolved later in life. This can then lead to oral fixation; these people such as smokers may then constantly "hunger" for activities involving the mouth (Sigmund Freud gross). ...read more.
Middle
A limitation of smoking in this behaviour is that some individuals will grow up and find smoking and its behaviour repulsive, this could have been caused by a parent dying or getting very ill. So they will find any smoking behaviour disgusting. Cognitive approach The Cognitive Approach in psychology is a very up-to-date and modern approach to human behaviour in psychology. It focuses on how we think, with the belief that these thought processes affect the way in which we behave throughout our day to day life. We as individuals our minds work just like computers encoding information and storing information, we then process the information as an output for example. Information processing approach So in this instance the individual decides to smoke for social reason, which could be either to fit into the group and be accepted or look cool or it could be both. This however is all made up in the mind and cognitive psychologists believe our thoughts influence our behaviour, this is received by perception. ...read more.
Conclusion
This approach is seen as being deterministic behaviour is determined by our biology its also falsifiable and objective Humanistic approach They believe that an individual's behaviour is connected to their inner feelings and self image. So smokers smoke to feel good and are part of their self actualisation process. This is their unique desire to achieve their highest potential as individuals from Abraham Maslow's (1908 - 1970) hierarchy of needs. So being accepted as a smoker is an unconditional positive regard and a conditional positive regard is where if you start to smoke you then and only then be accepted for who you are both of these regards will assist the individual in self worth and in happiness and help them on the journey to self actualisation. Strength of this approach is that it is all based on an individual's free will and we are unique and individual. A limitation is that not smoking is not in everyone's list of hierarchy of needs and won't lead them to self-actualisation (Maslow 1954). This approach is too subjective and lacks scientific research to support its ideas. ...read more.
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Here's what a teacher thought of this essay
4 star(s)
A good attempt at making sense of different theoretical approaches to explaining smoking. Some points for development - mainly awareness of synoptic issues and deepening the reflection.
Marked by teacher Stepahie Porras 26/03/2013
