Explain the effectiveness of the biological perspective in explaining one psychological or social problem.

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Alejandra Peñaloza

Explain the effectiveness of the biological perspective in explaining one psychological or social problem. (8 marks)

The biological perspective tries to explain aggression as an evolutionary function, which is necessary for survival. Most of these theories are based on non-human animal experiments, extending the findings to humans.

Lorenz, an ethologist, who was very influenced by Darwin’s theories, studied animal behaviour in natural settings.  With these studies he came to believe that aggression was an inherited mechanism, which was also found in humans, creating a deterministic and reductionistic theory.  Lorenz stated that aggression was controlled by environmental cues called sign stimuli, which either would stop the animal from being aggressive or on the contrary cause it to be aggressive. As aggression is innate and therefore unavoidable, Lorenz thought that if humans did vacuum activities, like exercise, was necessary to avoid having an aggressive behaviour against another. This process to reduce aggression levels was called catharsis.  Lorenz’s theory was very useful to understand animal behaviour with the sign stimuli, which was considered a great contribution; yet his theory lack s on human evidence as his findings are supported basically on non-human animal studies. Also the fact that it has not been found the human sign stimuli to cause aggression may suggest that aggression control mechanisms might be different to other species.

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There has been mapping of the brain to find where the aggressive behaviour is controlled, as localization of function; it has been found that the limbic area, in the evolutionary older regions, controls aggression. Still this theory depends also on the analogy to animals’ studies, again lacking human evidence for it.

Berkowitz showed evidence, which suggested humans had an aggressive response to pain or unpleasant feeling. This was an experiment done to humans where electrodes were placed on the brain causing electroshocks, which caused pain and made the person act aggressively, eventhough the brain does not have pain ...

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The Level of Analysis is good, but as before, a bit more range to show the examiner a greater knowledge of how to analyse psychology effectively wouldn't go amiss. I recommend varying because limiting to only one evaluative point throughout the answer may cause the candidate's score to be lowered due to the examiner not getting a proper feel of whether of not the candidate possesses abilities to evaluate more than simply the animal-human transition, especially seeing as the biological approach has plenty of human-only alternatives (Bandura, Zimbardo). Other than that, the evaluation feels nicely balanced and controlled and the citations of other studies are all relevant to what they candidate has to say.

The candidate demonstrates a good knowledge of the biological approach to psychology and it's assumptions with regards to explaining aggression. The candidate was given free choice here and has made a good decision to go with the topic of aggression, as it is a very frequently studied type of human behaviour, so there choice is appropriate, naturally encouraging a relevant focus on the question. There is every indication of a candidate working at a strong B grade for GCSE, as the candidates remains consistently focused and demonstrates fair analytical skills (a bit more variation in the disadvantages of biological studies would be good, especially seeing as there are many human-based biological aggression studies).