Essay Example on Abnormal Behavior: Exploring Theories of Psychological Causes

Introduction

An abnormal behavior is considered to be a behavior, which is distressing, disturbing, and maladaptive and causes distorted thoughts. In order to understand the cause of the abnormal behavior, the professionals in the field of abnormal psychology tend to use various theories that provide explanations on the abnormal behaviors. Some of these theories include the biological theory, the psychodynamic perspective, and a psychological approach. These theories usually provide different and varying opinions on the origin and cause of abnormal behavior (Luria,2014). The theories usually explain both the general and the specific behaviors, whereby they indicate that the general behavior can be triggered by a wide range of factors while the specific behavior is the behavior that is only triggered by a specific factor. The aim of this study is to discuss and analyze abnormal behavior using biological theory.

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The Biological Theory

The biological theory believes that abnormal behaviors are usually triggered by biological factors such as the neurotransmitter, hormonal imbalance, and genes. The theory believes that the neuroanatomical, the brain, and other crucial biochemical usually operate together to create or trigger the psychological process (Mehran, Oyama, & Shah, 2009). The biological theory usually obtains most of its perspective from the serotonin and the neurotransmitter that usually show most physiological conditions and abnormal behaviors. Reports relating to the biological theory usually illustrate how a brain injury can drastically alter a person's behavior or personality. The theory is therefore perceived to be more medicalized, thus considering a disorder to be a disease that is caused by internal body factors rather than the environmental factors. In this theory, the issues or behavior that are usually related to a certain environment such as chronic stress, lack of social support, and maladaptive personal upbringing are usually linked to the social approach of abnormal behavior. The biological theory usually suggests that the psychological illnesses that trigger abnormal behavior can be treated just like any other type of physical illness using drugs or surgeries. For instance, the electroconvulsive therapy used in this model has proved to be an effective treatment for the short-term depressive signs of bipolar disorder. Other effective. Other drugs that are used to treat the psychological symptoms include the antidepressant drugs that are considered to be effective in treating stress and depression (Mehran et al., 2009). However, when these drugs are discontinued, various signs and symptoms usually return, thus suggesting that the real cause of the abnormal behavior is mainly biological.

Compare and Contrast the Viewpoint of Your Theory with the Socio-cultural Viewpoint

According to the socio-cultural perspective, abnormal behaviors are usually learned through the social contexts that usually range from the community, culture, and the family. The perspective indicates that the cultural variables are usually acquired through the cognitive process and learning from other individuals within the society. For instance, the social, cultural perspective usually indicates that anorexia nervosa is a psychological disorder that is mainly found in western nations that value the human body. In this culture, this behavior of women being slim is learned and copied from other individuals within the society. The similarity between the viewpoint of the biological theory and the social, cultural viewpoint is that they both focus on the psychological factors that trigger the abnormal behaviour., therefore according to both viewpoints in order to trigger the psychological process, the brain has to work together with other biochemical. For instance, although anorexia nervosa occurred due to various cultural variables, it usually occurs due to the interaction of the brain and other biochemical factors (Kim et al., 2012). The two viewpoints also tend to differ in that; the socio-cultural perspective is usually learned in the social context that ranges from the family, the culture, and the community. Every abnormal behavior is usually learned depending on how the family and the culture view or undertake various things within the society. The biological viewpoint on abnormal behavior is that the psychological effects have to be triggered by various aspects that affect the brain, such as chronic stress, lack of social support, and maladaptive personal upbringing(Kim et al., 2012). This shows that according to the two viewpoints, the origin or source of the abnormal behavior tends to vary. The social-cultural perspective may be used when trying to understand the reason why people in a certain region or area develop certain abnormal behaviors while the biological viewpoints can be applicable in a situation whereby people want to understand how human body functioning results to various abnormal behaviors.

The Benefits or Drawbacks to Applying Multiple Theories to Defining Abnormal Behavior

The origin of the abnormal behaviors that occur in human life has continuously been explained by numerous theories that usually draw different perspectives and opinions on how these behaviors usually occur. Using different theories to explain the cause of the abnormal behaviors tends to have several drawbacks and benefits. Some of the benefits of using several theories include; first, they usually give varying perspectives on the probable causes of the behaviors. This enables the reader to asses all the theories and also develop different perspectives and opinions concerning abnormal behaviors. Secondly, using several theories tends to be beneficial since the theories usually complement each other(Luria,2014). The drawback of applying multiple theories is that they usually offer conflicting ideas that hinder the reader from identifying the actual cause of the abnormal behaviors

References

Kim, T., Choi, Y., Han, S., Chung, J. Y., Hyun, J., Li, J., & Hong, J. W. K. (2012, April). Monitoring and detecting abnormal behavior in mobile cloud infrastructure. In 2012 IEEE network operations and management symposium (pp. 1303-1310). IEEE. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6212067

Mehran, R., Oyama, A., & Shah, M. (2009, June). Abnormal crowd behavior detection using the social force model. In 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (pp. 935-942). IEEE. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.725.8045&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Luria, A. R. (2014). The role of speech in the regulation of normal and abnormal behavior. Elsevier. Retrieved from https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2355238/component/file_2355237/content