Although we cannot expect such definitive indications of the validity of psychological theories, we do look to success in treatment as a sign of their worth. Rodins paper emphasizes the physiological mechanisms in obesity and grew out of her work with Schachter on the situational cues overweight people use in evaluating their bodily states to determine if they are hungry (see Schachter, 1971). In some cases, holism in psychology can be very useful for example in humanistic/social/abnormal psychology, psychoanalysis, and perception (where the brain "understands an interprets sensory information" (Simply Psychology)). 1 views. Reductionist conceptions often imply distinct and well-defined syndromes that do not represent the complexity the social scientist sees. reductionism, in philosophy, a view that asserts that entities of a given kind are identical to, or are collections or combinations of, entities of another (often simpler or more basic) kind or that expressions denoting such entities are definable in terms of expressions denoting other entities. Attacking the problem from the other side, we might imagine implanting electrodes into the brains of isolated rats (or using drugs) to simulate the effects of a rich environment that in fact is not present for the organism. The two models most often used to account for the more common appearance of depression in women are social psychological in that both relate social factors to the observed sex-linked psychological differences. All were initially greeted as being nonaddictive; all are now recognized as having addictive properties. Support for the idea of approaching smoking behavior from the standpoint of underlying physiological mechanisms comes from another surprising source, Ovide Pomerleau, a pioneer in behavioral medicine. Yet he can declare that in our program we stress that the concept of addiction as a disease is useless (Cummings, 1979, p. 1121). However, in psychology something happens that does not usually happen as much with the hard sciences as physics: the scientific debate and that of ideas mixes a lot and can easily get confused. Kathleen Lennon has written: 'Explaining human action' -- subject(s): Explanation, Functionalism (Psychology), Intention, Methodology, Motivation (Psychology), Reductionism, Science and psychology . Eddy & May, 1973). The powers of psychiatry. What makes Morgans theoretical speculation more misleading is that the clear addiction model he implicitly attempts to tie his work into does not exist. A host of books and popular articles appeared in the seventies sounding the death knell for psychoanalytically oriented psychiatry (cf. Bettelheim, B. In other words, reductionist arguments state that things can be understood as being nothing but the sum of their components. The single most galvanizing concept today in abnormal psychology is vulnerability, or a childs inbred susceptibility to schizophrenia (cf. Basically, any plot of reality in which there is a living being learning certain habits and behaviors (voluntarily or involuntarily) psychology has a gap. American Psychologist, 1974,34, 654-663. There are two basic types of reductionism: psychological and methodological. Download preview PDF. But psychology it does not pretend to explain everything in the sense in which physics could explain everything , since in human actions all kinds of very complex phenomena intervene, both at the genetic and historical, cultural and contextual levels. Reductionism is the belief that human behavior can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts. The empty fortress. ), Essays in social neuroscience (pp. Recently, however, endorphin researchers like Goldstein (1976) have attempted to explain this inconsistency by suggesting that it is individuals whose bodies are deficient in endorphins who become addicted when they are exposed to a narcotic. From 70 to 80 hours a week, members of the family and a paid helper attempted to relate to the boy through his own autistic means of expression (such as rocking back and forth). There was also an article indicating that pregnant women given hormones have less sexually stereotyped male and female offspring (Psychologists Advance Theories of Sex Development, September 4). He does not go beyond this point to explain why the hypothesized central nervous system changes would lead running to be addictive for some people. In a section of his article entitled Physiologic Mechanisms of Running, Morgan (1979) employs indirect evidence to argue that running influences the central nervous system at a cellular level (p. 58). Schachter, S. The interaction of cognitive and phvsiological determinants of emotional state. You have entered an incorrect email address! Social psychologists often oppose reductionism and emphasize instead the social context that surrounds the individual. Medicine for the eighties: Better living through chemistry. At the present time, however, when the claims made for reductionist explanations have become so all-encompassing, it is important to express a contrary position, namely, that some problems may only be meaningfully analyzed at a social or a psychological level. Tennov, D.Psychotherapy: The hazardous cure. Indications that the American Psychological Association as an organization is increasingly supportive of reductionist approaches comes from the APA Master Lecture Series. Problems with sedatives and tranquilizers fit into a pattern of drug abuse in the United States. A child called Noah. The fourth session, in 1977, was given over to brain-behavior relationships and contained papers on several of the same topics presented at the first session, as well as on such topics of growing popularity as the physiology of consciousness and the lateral organization of the brain. New York Times, November 13, 1979, Part 3, pp. Schachters and his students obesity research, in turn, grew out of Schachters hallmark study of the influence of cognitive and social factors in individual responses to drug-induced states (Schachter, 1964). If the cure is chemical, Judith is convinced, then what is being cured must be some biological abnormality. It is not yet possible to assess the effects of the large-scale use of antidepressant drugs in our society.1It is instructive, however, to consider the case of tranquilizers as an example of a mood-altering treatment that has often been employed without attention to the conditions in the persons life that led him or her to need medication. Yanagita, T. Self-administration studies on various dependence-producing agents in monkeys. 0. Issues & Debates Summary | Classroom Poster / Student Handout Set Poster / Student Handout Psychology Weekly Update 8th January 2017 Issues & Debates: Reductionism & Levels of Explanation Study Notes Saturday Review, February 21, 1976, pp. Is there a recipe for happiness? For instance, how do addictions caused by genetic, congenital, and in utero factors differ from what Cummings calls acquired addictions (or, indeed, from each other)? Zinberg, N. The search for rational approaches to heroin use. Turning bread into stones: Our modern antimiracle. It is more of a philosophy or a faith in the ultimate nature of things. Pomerleau, O., Pertschuk, M., & Stinnett, J. ),Advances in experimental psychology(Vol. Many of these men were able to give up enormous heroin habits with surprising ease when they returned home (Zinberg, 1974). A breakthrough mentality now exists among many biologists, neurologists, and psychologists, who feel that we are on the verge of discoveries in the fields of biology, genetics, and the neurosciences that will remove some of our most persistent human problems. 41-42; 44. For example, the characteristics of a complex phenomenon, such as the movements of an ant mob, arise from the sum of the individual behaviors of each of these insects. Research in the neurosciences, especially, is expected to revolutionize the treatment of mental disorders. Moreover, the data presented in the article are entirely in the form of clinical studies of runners who manifest addictive behavior with regard to running. Severe and mild depression. Urbana: University of Illinois. The fields that incorporate this expansionsome of them newly definedinclude psychophysiology, psychopharmacology, neuropsychology, behavior genetics, and biological psychiatry, along with one reductionist discipline, sociobiology, that is not experimental or laboratory based. Gross, M. L.The psychological society. Eddy, N B., Halbach, H., Isbell, H, & Seevers, M. H. Drug dependence: Its significance and characteristics,Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 1965,32, 721-733. Multilevel analyses and reductionism: Why social psychologists should care about neuroscience and vice versa. This resolution of the respective domains of the biological and the social sciences has much appeal. Blum & Blum, 1969; McClelland, Davis, Kalin, & Wanner, 1972; Zinberg & Harding, 1979). A means of identifying a particular phenomenon by declaring that, once adequately comprehended, it can be demonstrated to be a different phenomenon, wherein the secondary phenomenon appears to be less complicated, more fundamental, or more elementary. Greenfeld, J. Reductionism in learning psychology. This society is vaguely hinted to have been brought about through political repression. In the same way, it is not the sad or expressionless face that produces depression in people with this type of disorder. At the same time, a full third of the drug-positive sample continued to take narcotics in the United States. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1977,86, 103-126. Medical and mental disorder: Proposed definition and criteria. As has been noted, the disease conception of alcoholism is a widely accepted notion of a behavior disorder that is determined by physiological and genetic factors. In terms of this model, girls are reared to seek security from significant others and to doubt their self-worth when social reinforcement from such people is not forthcoming. Liebowitz, M. R., & Klein, D. F. Hysteroid dysphoria. Essentially, the whole shebang can be boiled down to one thing that explains it all. Garden City, N.Y : Doubleday, 1979. 1; 5. In psychology, an accepted method is that by which psychological phenomena are reduced to biological phenomena, with the intention of proving that psychological existence is simply a product of biological functions. The rats were divided into two groups: one in which the rats were isolated in cramped quarters identical to normal laboratory conditions, the other in which the rats were given expansive and pleasant surroundings that they shared with other rats. Of the first four Master Lecture Series sessions, two were specifically devoted to reductionist topics. In this statement Cummings rejects on the basis of his practice the usefulness of the theoretical distinctions he has previously argued for accepting. Reductionism is the point of view that human behavior can successfully be resolved into its biological components, components that may then in turn be described as chemical and electrical events. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three parts: translation, derivation, and explanation. 107-120). Reports in the popular psychological and scientific press keep building the sense that laboratory breakthroughs on behavior are taking place. Other strands of therapeutic thought in this century, such as the concept of mental illness, have attempted to sidestep the guilt associated with psychodynamic interpretations, which are often seen to imply that the afflicted individual is responsible for his or her own problems. Washburn, S. L. Human behavior and the behavior of other animals. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 1979,2, 555-575. Thus genetically related populations have been shown to have different rates of alcoholism depending on their degree of assimilation from a culture with a low alcoholism rate into a culture with a high alcoholism rate (Jessor, Young, Young, & Tesi, 1970). This has to do with the reasonableness of a model as indicated by the economy with which it explains events and how well it does so in keeping with existing knowledge. The results of this research included the following findings. In doing so, it has been discovered that the main biological differences that distinguish the most intelligent from the least intelligent are found in the frontal lobes, the parietal lobes, and the anterior cingulate of each cerebral hemisphere. One best-seller in the seventies, Greenfelds (1978)A Place for Noah, expresses this viewpoint from the perspective of the father of an autistic child who maintains that the childs malady is the result of brain damage induced by prenatal or birthing conditions. ", Cite this page: N., Sam M.S., "REDUCTIONISM," in. Radnor, Pa.: Chilton, 1974. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1976. Electroshock treatment follows approximately the same kind of thinking. In this period, the German authorities declared that the only legitimate research for the alienist was pathological anatomy of the nervous system (Bromberg, 1975, p. 133), and autopsies of the insane were widely carried out in the United States as well as in Germany. 1-2. The most basic scientific goal in accounting for a class of behavior is that the account accurately describe the behavior and the data that have been accumulated about it. New York Times, May 29, 1979, Part 3, pp. Once welcomed as widely as antidepressants are today, tranquilizers have now been identified as the objects of considerable abuseso much so that medical and scientific bodies have recommended major corrections to what have become standard practices for prescribing these substances. Yet the density of articles like those listed above in a one-year period conveys a sense of imminence and potency in the brain revolution. Not infrequently, the most speculative hypotheses about brain-behavior relationships find their way into the newspapers pages. even in the case of most intense craving and perpetuation of compulsive abuse (Eddy, Halbach, Isbell, & Seevers, 1965, p. 723), they left the door open forin fact invitedpsychologists to make sense of what many still prefer to label addiction. Related Videos. Psychological Reductionism It organizes behavior into exact, discrete categories; by drawing physical connections between behavior and the nervous system, it offers compact causal explanations; finally, and most important to its appeal, reductionist thought holds out the promise of clearcut remedies to problems that otherwise seem painfully beyond solution. In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. Reductionism is a philosophical theory used in many scientific disciplines, including psychology. Our confidence in those areas of physics used for spaceflight is strongly reinforced by moon landings and photographs of Venus and Saturn. As Garmezy (1975) stated his vision, We stand on the threshold of advances in the biological sciences so relevant to psychopathology that one can look forward in the decades ahead to an ultimate resolution of the major psychotic disorders that have plagued mankind for centuries (p. 4). ),Classic contributions in the addictions. The reductionism is a framework of interpretation of reality through which everything that happens in a system (whatever it is, from a company to a human brain) can be understood by studying individually its "pieces", its components. The woman invested a relationship with a man she knew briefly with tremendous emotional significance. It is based on the idea that all phenomena can be reduced into smaller aspects, including your. Yet the theoretical questions the statement raises are substantial. Pomerleau (1979) has formulated an integrated approach for dealing with overeating, smoking, and problem drinking as learned patterns that can be modified. especially of a romantic nature, to which they respond with elevation of mood and energy. The thinking apparent in primitive reductionist approaches to psychology often continues uninterrupted into the present. Agency theory uses an innate predisposition to obedience and socialisation to explain obedience. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23862-0_1, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23862-0_1, eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0). Restak, R. The brain makes its own tranquilizers! Could these personality traits in the addict also be accounted for by a deficiency in endorphinsor by some other biological means? During this time, we have witnessed the introduction of heroin (to replace morphine), barbiturates, synthetic narcotics such as Demerol and methadone, and nonbarbiturate sedatives. Weissman, M. M., & Klerman, G. L. Sex differences and the epidemiology of depression. Zinberg, N. E., & Harding, W. M. Control and intoxicant use: A theoretical and practical overview. Blau, T. Torque and schizophrenic vulnerability: As the world turns. It is under such circumstancescircumstances not different from those surrounding the use of antidepressantsthat the bodily readjustments brought about when drug use is halted are experienced as pathological withdrawal (Peele, 1979). (Eds. Depression is a pivotal clinical category because at the same time that drug therapy has become the favored treatment modality, depression is often seen to involve important strands of cultural conditioning. The learned helplessness model (Seligman, 1974) is more general, but has been found to have special relevance to women. This optimism centers around several areas of research and speculation in the neurosciences: the discovery of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and norepinephrine and of endogenous opioid peptides (endorphins); the potential relationship between these substances and schizophrenia, depression, addiction, and pain; and the genetic predisposition to mental disorders transmitted through the balance of these chemicals in the body. It is more appropriate, in the words of the task force that prepared the recent edition of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM-III), to accept that the ultimate issue in judging . Rodin. In the last century treatments for insanity included strapping people into a centrifugal rotator (based on the idea that insanity was caused by insufficient circulation of blood to the brain) and shocking their systems by dunking them in cold water. In H. Shaffer M. E. Burglass (Eds. The reductionist perspective can be very useful, and nevertheless it entails a danger to be taken into account: it can generate circular explanatory frameworks when trying to give an understanding of what happens in a complex and changing phenomenon, as we will see. The ants will not be able to survive without a queen ant, because their genes bind them to live in a colony totally overturned in reproduction. Let's see an example related to cognitive sciences and the study of the brain. Reductionism is the belief that human behaviour can be explained by breaking it down into simpler component parts. This has nothing to do with psychological issues or whats going on in my life at the time, or that sort of thing, she says. ),The psychology of depression. Both of these models emphasize that it is the sex role allocated to women in our society which leads them to be susceptible to depression. Reductionism is not itself a theory, since it does not present testable hypotheses that tend either to support or to disprove it. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Science, 1973,181, 407-414. Yet what most reveals the trend toward reductionist thought is the extent to which psychologists as a group have turned to the biological sciences for direction and for theoretical underpinnings to their work. Hide transcripts. Biological Reductionism refers to the way that biological psychologists try to reduce behaviour to a physical level and explain it in terms of neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, brain structure, etc. When we talk of reductionist theories, we are referring to a set of ideas which have one distinguishing characteristic: the belief that things can be explained simply by reducing them down to their constituent parts. Inconsistencies in the work of Schachter, Pomerleau, Garmezy, and others are a sign that reductionist approaches have not been well integrated with existing knowledge in psychology, including often the research of such psychologists themselves. Science, 1976,193, 1081-1086. New York: Free Press, 1972. Log in. Master Lecture presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, August-September 1975. What is Reductionism? Greenfeld notes that psychodynamic theories have not led to demonstrably effective treatment and that what is called autism actually represents a variety of childhood syndromes. Greenfeld, J. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be deduced from or

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