• Question: Do you think that the cognitive and biological approach are the most significant approaches or do you believe other approaches are still important?

    Asked by IJZendoorn15 to Ben, Sam, Kirsty, Maggi, Rose on 13 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 13 Jun 2017:


      Just like in other areas of life, fashions and focuses change with time, technology, knowledge and our assumptions about what it means to be human. Over recent years, neuroscience, the study of the nervous system (including the brain), has become very important in psychology. That’s partly because we now have technology available to watch the brain’s activity over time, in a way we weren’t able to previously, and this has given us insight that we didn’t have before. There has also been a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches – for example, I do research into ‘social cognition’ which refers to cognitive processes relating to social phenomena. As a result, I draw on knowledge and approaches from cognitive psychology and social psychology, and I often refer to neuroscience research too. Different perspectives in Psychology don’t need to be mutually exclusive – you don’t have to choose one and ignore all others. Instead they can give you different perspectives on the same issue, which can help to create a much fuller picture of that issue. For example, if you wanted to find out how to make people perform better in exams, you might give them cognitive tests, you might also look at social factors (which could use an interview approach), and you could use biological approaches to see what happens in the brain and body. Sometimes, of course, approaches do disappear over time – Freudean theories used to be central to lots of work in psychology, but a lot of psychologists don’t agree with much of them now (though some aspects of those theories are still used). This is just a result of developing new knowledge and building more of a picture out of what we know. The human experience is so complicated that I think we need a range of approaches to address its many different aspects!

    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 16 Jun 2017:


      Hi 🙂 Great question – and one that’s really relevant right now! There was actually recently a (really short) article in the news about this (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/01/mental-health-problems-brain-bbc-equality?CMP=share_btn_tw). People (including the media) often tend to focus on biological factors when looking at mental illness in particular, but also other issues too…
      The main thing is to take into account all approaches to psychology when addressing issues. Certain disciplines of psychology might be more relevant for certain things, for example, if someone suffers from brain damage, obviously the biological approach; if they have obsessive compulsive disorder, they might be best to undergo cognitive behavioural therapy etc. However, social factors also play a role, with people being much more likely to recover if they have support, if they are from certain types of backgrounds etc. So to answer your question in a long way 😉 I think that all approaches are important – some might be more relevant than others in specific situations, but we still need to consider them all – they all have a place.

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