"Explain Concepts from the Behaviourist perspective and evaluate strengths and limitations of this perspective in relation to understanding and caring for patients"

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HECS 1021

Introduction to Psychology

“Explain Concepts from the Behaviourist perspective and evaluate strengths and limitations of this perspective in relation to understanding and caring for patients”

17/01/2006

Explain Concepts from the Behaviourist perspective and evaluate strengths and limitations of this perspective in relation to understanding and caring for patients.

The aim of this essay is to highlight the importance of behavioural psychology in healthcare and consider how healthcare professionals can employ behaviourist techniques to help their clients. Cardwell (2000 page 202) describes psychology as the “scientific study of mind and behaviour”. From this definition it may not seem obvious as to why psychology is important in healthcare; however the World Health Organisation defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (WHO 1946 cited in Banyard 2002). It is clear from this definition that healthcare professionals should not only seek to ensure that their clients have a healthy body, but that they should also have a healthy mind and engage in healthy behaviour and it is for this reason every healthcare professional should have a good understanding of psychology and how psychology can be used to help clients. This essay will firstly give a brief introduction to the behaviourist perspective, then move on to describe how classical and operant conditioning can explain the formation of behaviour and finally move on to examine the classical and operant conditioning theories that can be used by healthcare professionals to help their clients.

Behaviourism was developed by John Watson in the early twentieth century as alternative to the dominant psychoanalytic approach to psychology (Roth 1990). Watson believed that in order to mimic the successful sciences such as biology and physics it was necessary for psychology to be based on reliable experiments that produced observable results (Roth 1990), rather than on introspection, the results of which could neither be proved nor disproved (Gross 1992). Watson agreed with Freud that psychology provided a way to explain behaviour and give scientists insight into how the mind works. However Watson argued that no other forces, conscious or unconscious, played any part in explaining behaviour and therefore it was behaviour and behaviour alone that should be studied as the science of psychology (Roth 1990). Therefore behaviourism is very scientific approach to psychology and as a result the studies are not only reliable but also repeatable and therefore are widely used within healthcare. In spite of these benefits however, there exists some fundamental weaknesses, not only does behaviourism tend to overlook other factors that may influence behaviour, for example biological factors, behaviourism can not account for impulsive and imaginative behaviours (Malim 1992). Behaviourism is also based on the relationship between a stimulus and the subsequent response and focuses heavily on the influence of the environment on an individual’s behaviour (Rungapadiachy 1999) which leaves no room for the individual to possess a free will.

The behaviourist theory proposes that a large amount of an individual’s behaviour is learned through either classical or operant conditioning (Aitken 1996). Pavlov first discovered classical conditioning in 1927 whilst he was investigating the process of digestion in dogs (Cave 1999). Pavlov noted that often the dogs would start to salivate before they had even received their food; just the sight of the feeding bucket or sounds of the assistants approaching would trigger the dog’s salivation (Cave 1999). Pavlov tested his theory further through a series of investigations using a bell as a conditioned stimulus. To start with the bell was rung before the food was presented. At first this conditioned stimulus did not produce a response, that is, they did not salivate when the bell was rung, they did however have an unconditioned response of salivating when the food was presented (Gross 1992). Pavlov then started to ring the bell whist the food was being presented to the dogs and after numerous feeds the dogs began to salivate to the sound of the bell whether or not the food was presented (Cave 1999). The dogs had become conditioned to respond to the bell because they had learnt to associate the bell with food. Therefore classical conditioning is learning an association between two stimuli (for example the bell and the food) which conditions behaviour to respond to the conditioned stimuli.

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Although most of the evidence to support the theory of classical conditioning was gathered from experiments using animals, in 1920 two psychologists, Watson and Rayner, conducted an experiment on 11 month old baby to test whether or not the theory was applicable to humans (Gross 1992). At first the baby was shown a white rat and was completely fearless towards it, however after Watson repeatedly hit a metal bar behind the child’s head simultaneously to showing the rat, the child started to become fearful towards the rat when it was presented without the metal bar being struck (Hayes 1984). ...

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