Psychology is Imperfect and That’s Okay | SimplyPsych Week 2
Welcome to SimplePsych! Each week I synthesize the information from all of my psychology courses to provide a simplified version of what I’m learning and how it all connects. If you haven’t yet, check out my last article where I kicked off this series.
Main Points From Each Course
Adult Psychology:
- There are two types of ways to look at the brain using special types of imaging. One looks at the physical bits, while the other looks at how those bits work.
- Three perspectives look at older people compared to younger people, brain structure and function relationships, and task-function relationships (how the brain works when certain tasks are done).
- Declines in functioning and abilities may be due to a decline in neuron number and sizes, decreases in areas of the brain, and a decline in some brain chemicals (or weird processing of them).
- Things that become harder with age: understanding people are different (but not wrong), focussing on relevant info, active thinking in social situations, and memory.
- Things that get better? More positive emotions, and positive info is processed more. And more emotional regulation!
- One theory looks at how intelligence is composed of a network of neurons between the frontal areas and the parietal areas and how this changes with age (remember, some areas in the frontal areas decrease in size)
Abnormal Psychology:
- We, as a society, have made up what is and is not a disorder.
- Treatments involve clinicians learning as much about the client as they can. This involves lots of interviewing (whether with set questions or more organically) and sometimes tests.
- Basically clinicians need as much info to work off of as they can get if they are to effectively help their clients.
- Assessments should be evidenced-based.
- The Barnum Effect should be avoided. An example of this would be when a clinician makes a vague statement that the client agrees with. Only that agreement is meaningless because it is so vague that anyone can agree.
Positive Psychology:
- This field studies that which is sought for its own sake
- To “flourish” they say that you need positive emotions, engagement, meaning, and then three additional things from a list that includes vitality, self-determination, and optimism.
Personality Theory:
- Analogy of tug-of-war with mind
- Funder’s Second Law: there are no perfect indicators of personality
- Funder’s Third Law: something usually beats nothing
Connections
I am always hesitant to jump on the bandwagon and label things as subjective, but a lot of psychology admitted to being subjective this week. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; let me explain. When looking at psychological pathology, or mental disease, it has become important to give these diseases labels in order to organize and understand them.
Once we give diseases labels, we can more efficiently treat groups of people with the same diseases in similar ways because we expect the same treatment to work across the board (this isn’t a perfect model, but it was a place to start). The only problem is that no magic book with a guide to identifying diseases has fallen out of the sky. Instead, we as a society had to write that book.
We haven’t all agreed on a single book, but the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been a widely-used standard in the United States for decades. But as helpful as it has been, it is important to remember that people created these standards. And because people are fallible, so too is this standard. The DSM is a fluid document that is undergoing constant revision as new research is published.
So when we say someone has depression, we are saying that they fit the criteria for depression in a book that most people agree on. We are saying that they fit a construct, a label we created to help us understand things. It is not as clear cut as the medical model usually is. It’s much easier to tell when someone has a broken bone: they have a bone that is currently fractured and is likely causing pain. But when it comes to diseases of the mind, the rate of agreement between those experiencing the diseases and those diagnosing them is much lower. There is some disagreement, as is the case when something is opinion-based.
Even more apparent is this principle in personality psychology. When asked whether personality exists or not, everyone in the classroom said it does. But when asked what personality is, they fell silent. Why? This is another area where no standard fell from the sky for us to work off of. And it is yet another area where we had to create one ourselves (otherwise we wouldn’t be able to consistently study these concepts in a rigorous scientific manner). So a wide assortment of valid and less valid personality classifications were born: MBTI, Enneagram, etc.
Even the subfield of adult development cannot definitely say as much as we would like to think it can. To be able to accurately and objectively say that something will happen, or that something causes something else, an experiment is needed. This requires a strict process with very specific study designs that unfortunately cannot be used often in psychology because of ethical issues.
We can’t perfectly study the late adulthood outcomes of trauma in children because to do so would require us to randomly assign children to groups where some would be subjected to traumatic experiences. Again, not ethical. The best we can do is describe what we see and make educated guesses based on other evidence and trends.
This is where a lot of people might stop and dismiss the field of psychology altogether. Sure, it isn’t reliable as physics might be, but that doesn’t devalue its other uses. Psychology has shown over and over again to provide useful information that can promote cooperation, alleviate suffering, and help us understand each other better. While the information background may not be perfect, the field does provide a great deal of practical application to work off of. As Funder’s Third Law states, “something beats nothing, two times out of three.”
References
Cavanaugh, J. C., Blanchard-Fields, F. (2019). Adult development and aging. Boston, MA: Cengage.
Funder, D. C. (2016). The personality puzzle. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Seligman, M. E. (2011). Flourish. New York: Atria.
Whitebourne, S. K. (2017). Abnormal psychology: Clinical perspectives on psychological disorders. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.
