White, middle-class men devise most definitions of psychological abnormality. It has been suggested that this may lead to disproportionate numbers of people from certain groups being diagnosed as “abnormal.” Behaviorism is different from most other approaches because they view people (and animals) as controlled by their environment and specifically that we are the result of what we have learned from our environment. Many people engage in behavior that is maladaptive/harmful or threatening to self, but we don’t class them as abnormal:

Gupta and Singh (1982) found that couples in Jaipur, India, who married for love reported diminished feelings of love if they'd been married for more than five years. By contrast, those who'd undertaken arranged marriages reported more love if they weren't newlyweds. These findings reveal that passionate love "cools" over time, and that there's scope for love to flourish within an arranged marriage.” According to the name-letter effect, people are more likely to be attracted to someone who shares their initials. For example, a man named Robert will tend to be attracted someone named Rachel or Roberta. [15] Classical conditioning has been said to account for the development of phobias. The feared object (e.g., spider or rat) is associated with fear or anxiety sometime in the past. The conditioned stimulus subsequently evokes a powerful fear response characterized by avoidance of the feared object and the emotion of fear whenever the object is encountered. These findings have helped psychiatry take off and help relieve the symptoms of mental illness through drugs. However, Freud and other disciplines would argue that this just treats the symptoms and not the cause. Research doesn’t appear out of nowhere and what particular Psychologists investigate isn’t a random event.

10 Defense Mechanisms: What Are They and How They Help Us Cope

This had led cognitive psychologists to explain that memory comprises of three stages: encoding (where information is received and attended to), storage (where the information is retained) and retrieval (where the information is recalled). Time must also be taken into account, as what is considered abnormal at one time in one culture may be normal at another time, even in the same culture. This is where health psychologists take the finding that biological psychologists produce and look at the environmental factors that are involved to get a better picture. Evolutionary Psychology People with negative initials, such as P.I.G. or A.S.S., have lower life expectancy, most likely due to psychological stress from bullying and other negative experiences. [15]

Psychology approaches refer to theoretical perspectives or frameworks used to understand, explain, and predict human behavior, such as behaviorism, cognitive, or psychoanalytic approaches. We use defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from feelings of anxiety or guilt, which arise because we feel threatened, or because our id or superego becomes too demanding. For example, differences in brain structure (abnormalities in the frontal and pre-frontal cortex, enlarged ventricles) have been identified in people with schizophrenia. The Diathesis-Stress Model

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Under this definition of abnormality, a person’s trait, thinking or behavior is classified as abnormal if it is rare or statistically unusual. Just another reason to love your pooch • Over 80% of people feel more confident approaching an attractive person if that person has a dog with them. [7] Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) thought that emotions originated from the heart not the brain. [8]