Medical research 'underfunded'

News article about how mental health research is 'underfunded':

Article

An interesting point to consider - see the close parallels that are drawn between the way mental and physical illnesses are treated. The 'medical model' of atypical behaviour is an underlying assumption here.

Cognitive therapy

A couple of queries about cognitive therapy....


Philosophers such as Hume had suggested that emotions lead to thoughts. Cognitive primacy is an idea dating from the work of Magda Arnold in the 1960s, that it works the other way around: our thoughts come first, and our emotions follow. This was influential on the founders of CBT, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. Beck, for example, stated that there are three 'faulty views' which lead to depression: So Beck stated that 3 beliefs cause depression and therefore that thoughts come first, and emotion follows after. This 'cognitive triad' includes negative views of the self, negative views of the world and negative views of the future.

For example, a person fails an exam:

Negative view of self - "I'm a failure"
Negative view of the world - "Everyone is against me"
Negative view of the future - "I'll never be good at anything"

It is worth noting that this viewpoint links to theories of stress: Magda Arnold founded Appraisal Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appraisal_theory) which influenced Lazarus and Folkman's 'Transactional Model of Stress' (1984). The first two stages of this are are the appraisals of the stressor and the self. So again, thought processes are seen to come first, and emotions and behaviour (in this case stress) afterwards.

In reality it is not quite so simple... Schachter & Singer (1962) found that people assess their own emotional state in part by observing their own physiological state, e.g. by how fast their heart is beating. So the interaction between emotions, thoughts and physical states is complex and probably not one-way.

On projective tests

Useful and interesting article on projective tests such as the Rorschach inkblot test (see picture) - a sceptical viewpoint that is well worth considering.



http://www.psychologicalscience.org/newsresearch/publications/journals/sa1_2.pdf

Autism debate

You may have come across the recent research and debate into the causes of autistic spectrum disorders.

See for example this article by Simon Baron-Cohen, a prominent researcher in the field, who famously used the Sally-Anne test to investigate limitations in 'theory of mind' - the ability to attribute thoughts and knowledge to other people - as a possible central trait in autism.

Autism is also prominently featured in the current issue of Psychology Review, if you are interested in reading more.

Atypical Behaviour again; IRP

Well done on all today's presentations - there really has been some excellent work done on these topics - good research, and good quality of presentation too.

I will keep the posters to display in the future, but it occurred to me that the PPTs don't benefit from this. For this reason I intend to gather together as many as possible, and put them into a shared network folder for other students to view at their leisure.

I mentioned in the previous post that some aspect of the Atypical Behaviour topics could give rise to an IRP topic. Another possibility to bear in mind for the IRP could be doing something more experimental, along the lines of some of the memory experiments we have done so far, followed by a write-up.

Atypical Behaviour

Well done on all the good work so far on your 'Atypical Behaviour' projects. I hope these will be more or less complete by Friday/Monday, and we will soon schedule in time for presentations, perhaps at the end of next week.

As I said before, it would be great if you could take your research further - many of the topics would make excellent starting points for the IRP.