question_answer

Describe psychological models explaining abnormal behaviour.                                                       (CBSE 2014)

Answer:

Ans.     Psychological models maintain that psychological and interpersonal factors have a significant role to play in abnormal behaviour. These factors include:

Maternal deprivation (separation from the mother, or lack of warmth and stimulation during early year of life).

Faulty parent-child relationships (rejection, overprotection, over-permissiveness, faulty discipline, etc.

Maladaptive family structures (inadequate or disturbed family) arid severe stress.

The psychological models include the psychodynamic, behavioural, cognitive, and humanistic-existential models.

(a) The Psychodynamic Model: This model is the oldest and most famous of the modern psychological-models.

Abnormal behaviour is viewed as the result of intrapsychic conflicts.

This model was first formulated by Freud.

Abnormal behaviour is a symbolic expression of unconscious mental conflicts that can be generally traced to early childhood or infancy.

(b) The Behavioural Model: This model states that both normal and abnormal behaviours are learned and psychological disorders are the result of learning maladaptive ways of behaving.

The model concentrates on behaviours that are learned through conditioning and propose that what has been learned can be unlearned. Learning can take place by classical conditioning (temporal association in which two events repeatedly occur close together in time), operant conditioning (behaviour is followed by a reward), and social learning (learning by imitating others’ behaviour).

These three types of conditioning account for behaviour, whether adaptive or maladaptive.

(c) The Cognitive Model:

This model states that abnormal functioning can result from cognitive problems like negative thinking and irrational believes.

People may hold assumptions and attitudes about themselves that are irrational and inaccurate.

People may also repeatedly think illogical ways and make overgeneralizations. They may draw broad, negative conclusions on the basis of a single insignificant event.

(d) The Humanistic-Existential Model:

Humanists believe that human being born with a natural tendency to be friendly, co-operative and constructive, and are driven to self-actualize, i.e., to fulfil this potential for goodness and growth.

Existentialists believe that from birth we have total freedom to give meaning to our existence or to avoid that responsibility. Those who shirk from this responsibility would live empty, inauthentic and dysfunctional lives.

According to humanists, obstacles in self-actualization cause mental disorder.