This might be accomplished chemicals, oreven more futuristicallythrough stimulation of appropriate points in the brain (Shaffer & Burglass). Snyder, S. H. Opiate receptors and internal opiates. The study of neurosciences is now often the one common link in training programs for counseling, clinical, and educational psychology, as psychology practitioners come to believe that such grounding is necessary for their work. This explanation sounds very natural and convincing , with which it can be taken as an objective fact alien to philosophy, but in reality it is far from explaining the neurobiological basis of intelligence. Since Cummings uses addiction to refer to a general behavior syndrome, and not one connected to any one substance, does this mean that all the addictions he identifiesincluding overeating and gamblingmay be genetically predisposed and so forth? It is for this same reason that the World Health Organizations Committee on Addiction-Producing Drugs, a group led by pharmacologists, discarded the term addiction in favor ofdrug dependence. In George Orwells1984, one finds a society in which trauma and despair have been eliminated, while curiosity and emotions such as caring and love exist in only vestigial forms. Eddy, N. B., & May, E. L The search for a better analgesic. 38-45. In its place, they devised their own form of therapy for autism. It was thus especially interesting when a group of social-pychologically oriented researchers studied the effects of setting variables on the self-administration of morphine in rats (Alexander, Coambs, & Hadaway, 1978). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970,15, 215-222. It seems that as a psychologist dealing with matters also of concern to pharmacologists, Cummings naturally defers to their more scientific formulations and splices his own ideas onto these, however ill-fittingly. Garmezy, N.Vulnerable and invulnerable children: Theory, research, and intervention. American Psychologist, 1977,32, 997-l005. . All were initially greeted as being nonaddictive; all are now recognized as having addictive properties. Schachter, S. Pharmacological and psychological determinants of smoking.Annals of Internal Medicine, 1978,88,104-114. Hide transcripts. Archives of General Psychiatry, 1977,34, 98-111. Research in the neurosciences, especially, is expected to revolutionize the treatment of mental disorders. Zubin & Spring, 1977). Why these efforts would produce results different from current patterns of narcotic and other depressant drug use is not clear, however, since it is for just this stress-reducing effect that soldiers and laboratory animals presumably self-administer a narcotic in what we label as addiction. Both of these cases of autism testify to the work psychology should be doing and is not. Psychology is not applied biology nor is biology applied chemistry." Disciplines such as cybernetics and systems . Its notmeyou see; its my biochemistry. (p. 31). Download preview PDF. Eddy & May, 1973). For others it is congenital and in utero (pp. According to this thinking, personality variables, and even the effects on the individual of different social and cultural milieux, should be mirrored by neurological differences. In some cultures in which problem drinking is practically unknown (such as rural Mediterranean societies), drinking does not lead to the destructive disinhibition and antisocial behavior (such as fighting, reckless driving, blackout, sexual aggression) that in fact define alcoholism in our culture (Blum & Blum, 1969). A growing consensus is emerging that the best hope for understanding and dealing with psychological problems lies with work being done in genetics, biology, and the neurosciences. The results of this research included the following findings. The basis of this addiction is that the individual substitutes the anxiety-reducing effects of the drug for the capacity to cope with anxiety and its sources (Gray, 1978). 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. Peele, S.Addiction: The analgesic experience. . A reductionist attitude blinds the observer to the existence of emergent properties. That is why the reductionism should only be taken as a tool, and not as a philosophy that allows to generate simple explanations about facts that are not. Nicholas Cummings is another psychologist who has approached addiction as a behavioral phenomenon that extends beyond the matter of drug abuse. Science, 1976,193, 1081-1086. 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 Articles are written not only by science reporters but by scientific professionalsoften those conducting the research themselvesthat create the impression for most educated Americans that the study of human behavior is being revolutionized. But its hard to leave out the exclamation points when you are talking about a veritable philosophers stonea group of substances that hold out the promise of alleviating, or even eliminating, such age-old medical bugaboos as pain, drug addiction, and, among other mental illnesses, schizophrenia. Essentially, the whole shebang can be boiled down to one thing that explains it all. ),Advances in experimental psychology(Vol. New York: Academic Press, 1974. 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. 0. In L. S. Goodman & A. Gilman (Eds. Reductionism likes to divide explanations of behaviour into separate components, whilst holism likes to look at the picture as a whole. Related Videos. The same difficulty arises with any effort to explain multifaceted and variable psychopathological syndromes, such as psychosis, depression, and addiction, in terms of any single factor. Proponents of the more sophisticated reductionist arguments outlined in the previous section may expect to find that helplessness or other learned response tendencies have explicit correlates in the nervous system. In R. L. Spitzer & D. F. Klein (Eds. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969. Examples come from the writings of two applied psychologists whose thinking has been influential in their fields and who resort to reductionist models that their work actually seems to run counter to rather than to support. New York: Free Press, 1967. spend much of their time seeking approval . Garmezy used as a climactic example in this paper a description of an invulnerable child (one highly resistant to mental disorder). . Saturday Review, March 5, 1977, pp. Chemistry of pain begins to emerge. . It can be treated like the nature-nurture, or the free-will, determinism debates. The term is primarily utilized in positions which make an effort to have an understanding of human heritage, civilization, or mental processes with regard to animal behavior patterns or physical principles. Gross, M. L.The psychological society. Reports in the popular psychological and scientific press keep building the sense that laboratory breakthroughs on behavior are taking place. 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). but actually prevents them from happening. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Reductionism in Psychiatry. Do not; because of reductionism, It would have confused a description of the effects that a global system has on the pieces of the brain with the causes of what is seen in that global system. Severe and mild depression. In the same vein, what is gained by imagining that a GI undergoes changes in his nervous system under war conditions in Asia that increase his likelihood of being addicted, rather than conceiving of a soldiers finding a narcotics effect more alluring because he is uncomfortable, fearful, deprived of rewarding enterprise and intimate relationships, and not in control of his environment? New York Times, May 29, 1979, Part 3, pp. However much one empathizes with Greenfeld, his own observations do not provide support for his hypothesis of congenital brain damage in his son. 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. Dr. Peele is the author of 14 books. The eventual goal from the reductionist perspective is to find neurological correlates for individual actions, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and memories-as well as for entire behavior syndromes such as addiction and schizophrenia. Cummingss allegiance to models that his treatment of addiction proves to be useless is thus a violation of the canons of science. Several criteria of scientific validity offer help in assessing opposing viewpoints in this area of human behavior. In other words, reductionist arguments state that things can be understood as being nothing but the sum of their components. In addition, from reductionism it is assumed that the connection between these pieces and the properties that these pieces express is less debatable than the relationship between the system as a whole and the properties it has, so the general arises from the individual and never The opposite happens. Science, 1973,181, 407-414. Today one of the most damning criticisms against a particular psychological analysis is that it blames the victim.. Multilevel analyses and reductionism: Why social psychologists should care about neuroscience and vice versa. Is this more concise and understandable than a conception that rats find narcosis not to be desirable when it interferes with successful intraspecies competition and with the appeal of a diverse and welcome environment? Ariew, R. (1976). When a distinguished group of World Health Organization pharmacologists declared of the syndrome that they now labeledpsychic dependence, this mental state is the most powerful of all of the factors involved in chronic intoxication with psychotropic drugs . . New York: Random House, 1978. - 5.196.112.150. The thinking apparent in primitive reductionist approaches to psychology often continues uninterrupted into the present. This week's term is reductionism. This involves first identifying and labeling the behavior. 74-82. This boy had lost his father, and Garmezy cited a speech the boys mother made in which she inspired her son with the belief that he and she both would be able to survive the fathers death. When this occurs, psychology and psychiatry will be subsumed by the field Restak calls psychobiology. Burns. Greenfeld, J. American Psychologist, 1979,34, 1119-1129. Could these personality traits in the addict also be accounted for by a deficiency in endorphinsor by some other biological means? One reason that social, personality, and cultural variables have not been taken to be as scientifically meaningful as biochemical factors is that they are not easily made a part of experimental designs. Most important in forming Greenfelds viewpoint is his unwillingness to accept the stark image of parenting that Bettelheim depicts as the source of autism. Physician and Sportsmedicine, 1979,7(2), 55-70. Monthly Women'S Popular Science Magazine On Psychology. The Greenfeld account holds out the hope that biology will succeed where psychology has failed. 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). Stemming from their experience with a school of self-exploration called the Option Method, the therapy was based on constant, intensive one-to-one interactions with the child. Reductionism in social psychology. Peele, S. Redefining addiction: II. Psychologists advance theories of sex development. For example, addicts have often been identified as having personality syndromes involving passivity, a negative outlook on life, and a readiness to form dependent relationships other than those connected with drugs (Chein, Gerard, Lee, & Rosenfeld, 1964). Today the pendulum has swung the other way, and we are at the end of a long downswing in the popularity of psychodynamic psychotherapy. A. Anxiety. Yanagita, T. Self-administration studies on various dependence-producing agents in monkeys. 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. ), Essays in social neuroscience (pp. The Goldstein hypothesis continues to account for addiction with essentially one factor. Pomerleau. Reductionism encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims about the relations between different scientific domains. You have entered an incorrect email address! Indications that the American Psychological Association as an organization is increasingly supportive of reductionist approaches comes from the APA Master Lecture Series. So far, researchers have carefully avoided hyperbole in their descriptions of the endorphins. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. In: Psychology in Perspective. Pharmacological accounts have typically ignored the finding from field studies of narcotics use that many people who take in substantial amounts of narcotics do not become addicted (cf. Explaining interactions between an individual and his or her setting requires a more dynamic biological model, such as one which holds that the organism undergoing stress is a different biological creature from the one who is not, that this difference is regular and significant, and that it combines with the individuals characteristic biochemistry in potentially predictable ways. 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. This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. Reduction A doctrine to which most philosophers of science subscribe (and to which I subscribed for many years) is the doctrine that the laws of suJh `higher-level' sciences as psychology and sociology are reducible to the laws of lower-level sciences - biology, chemistry, ultimately to the laws of elementary particle . Intelligence is such an interesting and popular as controversial concept, since there is no very clear and exhaustive definition of what is or is not. From a reductionist perspective, this can be interpreted as a sign that these parts of the brain are the main ones involved in the intelligence of the person, those that trigger the whole process of reasoning and maintaining information in working memory, etc.The rest of brain structures may be indispensable, but in any case they are auxiliary members, they participate by helping in the work of the others. What makes Morgans theoretical speculation more misleading is that the clear addiction model he implicitly attempts to tie his work into does not exist. It was therefore a significant research advance when government-sponsored investigations of drug use among soldiers in Vietnam led to the study of more representative populations of narcotics users. Limitations of current treatment and research on smoking: A discourse on the need to understand underlying mechanisms. Thus pharmacological theories of addiction that have focused on the addictive characteristics of various drugs have not been able to deal with the diversity of usage patterns found with these drugs. Behavioral Medicine Update, 1980,2(1), 22-26. Blau, T. Torque and schizophrenic vulnerability: As the world turns. In the same way, it is not the sad or expressionless face that produces depression in people with this type of disorder. Most of the research concerning biochemical processes, on the other hand, is conducted in the laboratory, most often with animals. Liebowitz, M. R., & Klein, D. F. Hysteroid dysphoria. Such shifts in theoretical developments often leave psychologists traditional concerns dangling. This study (one of a series with similar results conducted over a period of four years; Alexander, Hadaway, & Coambs, 1980) experimentally validates the Vietnam data in showing that the actual process of addiction, up to and including the appearance of withdrawal,is crucially influenced by social and environmental variables. Medical and mental disorder: Proposed definition and criteria. Tennov, D.Psychotherapy: The hazardous cure. Morgan makes no attempt to ascertain whetheror howrunning addicts differ neurologically from nonaddicted runners or from nonrunnners. The meaning of addiction in our lives. In H. Shaffer M. E. Burglass (Eds. What if the intelligence was based on the coordinated work in real time of millions of neurons distributed throughout the brain, in turn maintaining interactions with other nerve cells and with the substances that reach them through the blood vessels? . 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. It is also possible to conceive that if stress responses in the nervous system were to be completely identified, then these could be eliminated directed in war settings or ghettos, where addiction is especially likely. Today it regularly confuses investigations of contributory factors in the basic sciences with complete accounts of the behaviors and mental states that these factors influence. The addiction-prone individual would then be made neurologically identical to the individual who has superior resistance to addiction. 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. Reductionism is the belief that human behavior can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts. He may still say about smokers who do not conform to this pure model that their behavior can be understood in terms of such notions as self-control, concern with health, restraints, and so on (Schachter, 1978, p. 111), yet he no longer sees any reason to introduce such variables as self-labeling, social influence, or other social or cognitive factors into his model. Cummings presents no evidence to support this statement; nor does he discuss evidence presented by others. 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. 107-120). Up to one third or more of the soldiers in Vietnam were thought to be using narcotics. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 1979,2, 555-575. 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. If you want to understand something, the reductionist approach would propose simply taking a look at each of its constituent pieces. Alexander, B. K., Coambs, R. B., & Hadaway, P. F. The effect of housing and gender on morphine self-administration in rats. We will not be held in political chains in 1984, however. Schizophrenia; Vast effort focuses on four areas. Psychology is a field of research that aims to explain many things: from the behavior of buyers to the most effective learning methods, from the way in which drug use affects social relationships and an infinity of issues that do not They have too much to do with these. Yet at least some doctors and patientsincluding the woman whose case was introduced earlierwould not feel that this step was necessary and would be supported in their belief by the new brain-behavior hypotheses. It is because of this learned pattern that women are more dependent and more frequently experience loneliness and depression. Problems with sedatives and tranquilizers fit into a pattern of drug abuse in the United States. The 4 types of love: what different kinds of love are there? This resolution of the respective domains of the biological and the social sciences has much appeal. Both psychologists have written about addiction; both attempt to expand what has been a pharmacological concept to areas of behavior other than those involving drug use. 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. Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms. Cummings indicates that he considers alcoholism to fall within the category of those addictions that some people are genetically predisposed toward. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative, Over 10 million scientific documents at your fingertips, Not logged in In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. While the first criterion in evaluating a scientific model is its accuracy in describing a phenomenon and the factors that lead to and surround it, an additional criterion is parsimony. Some have tried to trace this difference in the sexes to biological differences such as hormones or X chromosomes. 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. 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. The article traces the case of a woman who has alternating fits of euphoria and depression. Psychopharmacology, 1978,58, 175-179. ", You may be interested: "Parts of the human brain (and functions)". Dr. Stanton Peele, recognized as one of the world's leading addiction experts, developed the Life Process Program after decades of research, writing, and treatment about and for people with addictions. American Journal of Epidemiology, 1974,99, 235-249. J.Obesity: Why the losing battle? Thus, translating the effects of drinking into biochemical events while excluding the cultural meaning of drinking does not allow one to determine the presence or absence of alcoholism in an individual. Master Lecture presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 1977. Yet he can declare that in our program we stress that the concept of addiction as a disease is useless (Cummings, 1979, p. 1121). In psychology, reductionism refers to a theory that seems to over-simplify human behavior or cognitive processes, and in doing so, neglects to explain the complexities of the mind. The type of reductionism that is currently of most interest in metaphysics and philosophy of mind involves the claim that all sciences are reducible to physics. 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. A basic medical text reports that the term addiction can no longer be employed without further qualification or elaboration (Jaffe, 1975, p. 285) because of the confusion surrounding the physiological basis of habitual drug use. Greenfeld, J. In other cases, reductionism is the best approach to a problem. Thus, this diagnosis enables physicians and others to administer mind-altering drugs to people for problems they have in forming adequate relationships. Radnor, Pa.: Chilton, 1974. Vulnerability: A new view of schizophrenia. Honorary Research Fellow, Many of the discussions that take place within psychology are not, technically, psychological discussions, but rather philosophical. especially of a romantic nature, to which they respond with elevation of mood and energy. The women who are typically the patients in these cases also ideally undergo psychotherapy to increase their awareness of the patterns their relationships follow. Our confidence in those areas of physics used for spaceflight is strongly reinforced by moon landings and photographs of Venus and Saturn. Turning bread into stones: Our modern antimiracle. University of Michigan Medical Center Journal, 1970,36, 216-224. In order to appreciate just how alluring explanations for mental disorders that propose straightforward physical mechanisms for observed mental conditions are, consider that shell shock was originally thought by 20th-century psychiatry to be due to concussion or inner ear injury (Robitscher, 1980). A critical examination of some current assumptions in the treatment of alcoholism. Reductionism is an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things. The examples of reductionism given in this article thus far have come from the expansion of the medical and biological sciences into what had previously been the domains of psychology and psychoanalysis. A child called Noah. New York Times, May 1, 1979, Part 3, pp 1-2. 15 questions about your life to know what you want, Collective unconscious: what it is and how it was defined by Carl Jung. 1 views. No doubt many activities affect the central nervous systemhow this does or does not lead to addiction, and for which individuals addiction appears, are the important questions. What would happen if this mental capacity was not the task of parts of the brain working each on their own and "pooling" their work from time to time? Prominent endorphin researchers such as Snyder (1977) and Goldstein (1976) have themselves put forward explanations for addiction based on endorphins in popular science journals. It seems fair to say that the series marks a rapid movement away from non-physiologically based areas of psychology such as cognition, learning, perception, and abnormal and social psychology, as well as away from the humanistic, experiential, and applied areas that at one time appeared as though they might dominate psychology in the seventies. 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. 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. If not, why do those who become addicted to drugs simultaneously display such traits? Pomerleau, O. Behavioral medicine: The contribution of the experimental analysis of behavior to medical care. (p. 7). The empty fortress. Liebowitz and Klein propose that sufferers of this disorder have abnormal regulation of the neurotransmitter-like substance phenylethylamine and that this can be remedied by injecting the antidepressant phenelzine. ),The psychology of depression. Chemical curbs memory losses,New York Times, January 9, 1979, Part 3, pp. His work has been published in leading professional journals and popular publications around the globe. Reductionism in Psychological Theory.
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