Determinism and Free Will is one of the classic debates in psychology and refers to the extent that psychologists believe human behaviour is influenced by forces beyond our control. Alternatively, do we have personal control over our actions.
Culture Bias In Psychology
Culture Bias in Psychology is when a piece or pieces of research are conducted in one culture and the findings are generalised and said to apply to lots of different cultures. Cultural bias can also be seen when designing research, the process by which data is obtained can lead to culturally bias results. For example, an IQ test measuring Western IQ could be written to ‘favour’ Western cultures. Using this test in Non-Western cultures could cause a bias in the results simply because the test is measuring something from the bench marks of different cultural experiences.
Institutional Aggression in the context of prisons: Dispositional and Situational Explanations.
AO1: Explanations of Institutional Aggression (the AQA Specification refers to aggression in prisons):Psychologists have been very interested in how institutions such as prisons might cultivate aggressive and violent behaviour. Two major theoretical stances have arisen to account for institutional aggression:
Social Psychological Explanations of Human Aggression, including the Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis, Social Learning Theory as applied to Human aggression, and Deindividuation.
The Frustration Aggression Hypothesis is a social psychological theory that argues that anger, hostility and even violence are always the outcome when we are prevented from achieving our goals (i.e. frustration).
The Ethological Explanation of Aggression, including reference to Innate Releasing Mechanisms and Fixed Action Patterns. Evolutionary Explanations of Human Aggression.
Lorenz (an Evolutionary Psychologist) observed that fights between animals of the same species resulted in little actual physical damage. Most aggressive encounters comprised of mainly ritualistic signalling (e.g. displaying claws, baring of teeth etc) and rarely reached the point of becoming physical. Typically, intra-species aggressive encounters end with ritual appeasement displays. These indicate acceptance of defeat and inhibit aggressive behaviour in the victor, preventing damage to the loser (e.g. in defeat a wolf will expose his neck to the victor, deliberately making itself vulnerable).
Genetic factors in aggression, including the MAOA gene
Several studies have suggested that heritability accounts for about 50% of the variance in aggressive behaviour. Monozygotic (identical) twins share 100% of their genes, while dizygotic (non-identical) twins share only about 50%, as a result we would expect to find greater similarities in aggressive behaviour between MZ twins if aggression is mostly influenced by genetic factors. Examples of concordance rates for different types of aggression are below.
Physical aggression MZ=50% and DZ=19%, Verbal aggression MZ=28% and DZ=7%.
Neural and hormonal mechanisms in aggression, including the roles of the limbic system, serotonin and testosterone.
Subcortical structures in the brain (including the hypothalamus and amygdala) thought to be closely involved in regulating emotional behaviour.
Androgyny and The Bem Sex Role Inventory
What is it? Androgyny is displaying a balance of similarly high levels of masculine and feminine characteristics in one’s personality.
Gender differences in coping with stress. The role of social support in coping with stress, types of social support, including instrumental, emotional and esteem support.
Description, AO1 — Gender Differences in Coping with Stress: One of the criticisms of the research into the acute stress response (the SAM pathway) is that it was derived from […]
Managing and coping with stress: drug therapy (benzodiazepines, beta blockers), stress inoculation therapy and biofeedback.
Examples of Anti-anxiety drugs include; Librium and Valium (these are the most common drugs to treat anxiety and stress).
