Contrasting The Factors of The Biological and Behavioural Approach in Psychology

Psychology, like any subject has displayed drastic changes and improvements in past decades as well as means of improving day to day life. The subject evolved from the psychodynamic approach which focuses on what goes on in the mind, where it is believed that our behaviour is established due to unconscious thoughts. However, due to lack of scientific evidence many criticised psychodynamic theorists such as Freud, and turned to behaviourist psychologists like Watson (1913), who revolutionised the subject by encouraging observable behaviour in the early 20th century, more scientific than the psychodynamic theories on the unconscious and conscious mind. Eventually, later introducing the Cognitive approach which focused on the thought processes in the mind, enabling psychologists to acquire understanding and knowledge through aspects such thought, senses and our experiences. Recent advances in technology have allowed us to approach the subject in a more reductionist, scientific manor such as the interactions between neurons in the brain, known now as the Biological approach. This essay will focus on the comparison and contrasting factors of the biological and behavioural approach by discussing, for example, abnormalities and comparing the different explanations each of the approaches has.

The contrasting and diverse approaches help psychologists take each case as its own and analyse it fully by looking at all the possible reasoning’s behind behaviour and/ actions. According to Marshelle Thobaben (2004), a Phobia is an anxiety disorder with an extreme irrational fear of a situation or object and eventually results in life changing consequences due to avoidance, for example agoraphobia- a fear of going places where one may panic and feel trapped. Mowrer (1947) used both classical and operant conditioning in order to explain the development of a phobia which is now commonly referred to as avoidance conditioning. This concept stems from the behaviourist approach. This theory states that through classical conditioning, the feared object/situation is associated with being panicked and fearful. Therefore, through the operant conditioning the fear is regulated and carries on as the individual becomes versed with the fact that their fear is reduced on avoiding the situation/object causing the panic. This is an example of negative reinforcement as when the individual doesn’t come in contact with the stimulus, there is little/no anxiety.

Similarly, Watson and Rayner (1920) found by using classical conditioning, they were able to associate little (9-month-old) Albert’s fear of loud noises with a white rat, which he was not previously afraid of. They wanted to test the notion that by the following procedure - classical conditioning - he could use the unconditioned response to condition a child to fear the distinctive stimulus that normally would not be feared by a child. This proved that a phobia could develop through association. Additionally, this study also concluded that the phobia can be further generalised to objects of similar nature. In Little Alberts case, he went on to fear furry white objects similar to the rat, such as cotton wool. However, in contrast the biological explanation has proved genetics to have a cause towards phobias. The biomedical/genetic approach explains phobias by asking questions such as - Could it be that humans are pre-programmed to fear certain objects? Öst (1992) found that those with a specific phobia for blood injuries had 60% of first-degree relatives who has the same phobia.

Similarly, a twin study, conducted by Torgersen (1983), stated in The Heritability of common phobic fear (2000), found concordance rates of 31% in monozygotic twins in comparison to significantly lower for dizygotic twins. It was established that close relatives of agoraphobics demonstrated to be more likely to suffer with the phobia as apposed relatives of those who didn’t. As stated above, the behavioural and biological approaches differ dramatically in their conclusions of the development of Phobias. However, despite the fact that the two approaches seem to differ so much, they do have their similarities.

Both approaches are able to collect objective data in order to make conclusions, resulting in a deterministic and reductionist outcome from results. This is due to the failure to recognise free will or consider other factors which may be influencing the individuals suffering. Although due to the reductionist prospect of the two, clear predictions can be made using the scientific supported evidence, giving the approaches huge assets in comparison to others.