Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggests that human beings are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and environmental events. Human behavior ends up being largely be influences by what the person learns, which may occur by observation, as well as through direct experience. Depressed and non-depressed have different self-concepts. The depressed blame everything that goes wrong on them. They have a very low self esteem because they feel that they are unworthy of living. When something good happens they believe it was cause by an external factor because they aren’t good at all. Bandura also states that at some point these depressed people set their goals to high and do not get close to completing them so they fall into depression. They have low self-efficacy because they believe they are not able to control themselves. Repeated failure reduces self efficacy to a point that these depressed people no longer have goals in life because they believe they won’t reach them.

Julian B. Rotter’s theory of social learning, states that expectations are a crucial factor in social learning. Rotter claims that behavior is determined by two major types of "expectancy": the expected outcome of a behavior and the value a person places on that outcome. He described a general theory of personality with variables based on the ways human beings view their experiences. He believes that when people believe they can affect or influence a situation they feel they have an “internal” control over the event. When people feel they are under the influence of their environment and they can’t do anything to change a situation they have an external locus of control and thins generates a low self-esteem. People with depression have an external locus of control.

Martin Seligman, while working with classical conditioning, discovered new phenomena called Learned Helplessness. He put a dog into a huge box, next to it was another box and both boxes were divided by a small fence. In the boxes wee harmless electric shocks. When there was an electric shock the dog would jump to the other side. Then he did the same but this time put a collar around the dog’s neck to prevent him from passing to the other side. At first the dog would go crazy but after a while he learned that there was nothing to do but lay down and cry. When the same dog was put into the huge box without a collar and the shock would go on he had learned that nothing would prevent his harm so he did not jump to the other side and would lay down and cry. This shows us The theory of learned helplessness was then extended to human behavior, providing a model for explaining depression, a state characterized by a lack of affect and feeling. Depressed people became that way because they learned to be helpless. Depressed people learned that whatever they did is futile. During the course of their lives, depressed people apparently learned that they have no control.

Aaron Beck created a theory called Cognitive Therapy. Beck's cognitive therapy consists of lessoning psychological suffering through therapy. He believes the depressed are angry and take that anger inwards. This decisive approach permits the therapist and practitioner to value the integrative nature of cognitive behavior therapy. If people who are depressed can learn to combat self-doubts in the therapy session, they may be able to apply their newly acquired cognitive and behavioral skills in real-life settings. He strongly believes that depressive people have negative thinking and biased interpretation of events. The key to his therapy is to restructure the distorted beliefs in order to change dysfunctional behaviors.

http://www.helium.com/items/821843-aaron-becks-cognitive-therapy-approach-to-the-treatment-of-depression

http://www.learning-theories.com/social-learning-theory-bandura.html

http://psych.fullerton.edu/jmearns/rotter.htm

http://www.noogenesis.com/malama/discouragement/helplessness.html

Lobotomy

There are nerves that connect the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. When these nerves are damaged and malfunctioning. There was an idea that once these nerves were severed they would generate into healthy connections. This idea and process came to be known as lobotomy. Some people were lobotomized by backaches, headaches and agon9izing pain that often caused inexplicable pain to the patient. The three common versions of psychosurgery were prefrontal leucotomy, prefrontal lobotomy, and transorbital lobotomy.

Leucotomy involved drilling holes into a patient’s skull in order to access the brain. Once in contact with the brain the surgeon would use a leucotome to discrete the injured nerves. The procedure consisted of sliding a “pencil” into the holes in the skull, into the brain, and using the slide to make the loops come out. The surgeon could sever the nerves by removing “cores” of brain tissue, slide the loop back in, and the operation was complete.

The prefrontal lobotomy also drilled holes into the skull of the patient, but in the upper forehead instead of the top of the skull. Another difference from the leucotomy was that the surgeon used a blade to cut the brain instead of a leucotome. This was more destructive in the way that more injured nerved were cut and severed. Even though this process helped some people it was considered unethical once medicine replaced the risk of going into a lobotomy.

The most unethical and shameful way of psychosurgery was transorbital lobotomy. This was a “blind” operation in which the surgeon was not even aware of what spots he was cutting and what nerves he could have damaged. A sharp, stick-like object would be inserted through the eye socket between the upper lid and the patient’s eye. When the doctor thought (was not sure) he was at about the right spot, he would hit the end of the instrument with a hammer. How can someone go into surgery without knowing whether or not the surgeon will be lucky to hit the right spot? These surgeons had a lot of practice but everyone makes mistakes, so pills were a relief to this risk taking surgery. There were other ways of lobotomy but these were the most known and used.

Despite that these surgeries could cause the life of someone and that they were very risky some people went into surgery having the hope of coming out cured. Some people that thought their children were extremely misbehaved would send them to the lobotomist. This became very unethical until scientists discovered a pill that would do the same work as the lobotomy without risks of failure. There was extensive evidence that psychosurgery was not therapeutic; however operations continued to be practiced for many years. This was because it was considered unprofessional to criticize another physician in public, so many doctors who knew that psychosurgery was a farce did not make their opinions known.

As the right to state an opinion raised people started isolating Lobotomy and soon lobotomists were detested and scorned for their unethical practices.

Bipolar Disorder: Boy Interrupted

Bipolar disorder is a brain disorder that causes unusual shifts in mood and the ability to carry out daily tasks. Due to this disorder, Evan Perry could not live a normal life. When he was a small kid he used to talk about death and rifles, things that 6-year olds don’t think about. The Perry family had already experienced a similar case. Evan’s uncle suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide at the age of 21. Evan’s parents said they knew that when a really energetic and happy episode came, a very depressed one would follow. Evan’s life was like a roller coaster, after a high peak came a hard fall. This disorder affected everyone around Evan, his parents, siblings and friends. His first suicide attempt was at a very young age when he was found in his school’s roof. After going to many institutions, he escaped and did crazy things such as breaking into a stranger’s house but he also learned a lot and became more dedicated to cooperate with his teachers. In wellspring, he developed many skills and drank some pills that balanced his mood shifts. The weakness of these pills is that they make people feel as if they have no emotions. The medications controlled his behavior and everyone around him saw his huge improvement. His parents even thought he might be cured but bipolar disorder can not be cured. Evan had thoughts such as “nobody loves me”, “everyone would be better off without me” just like any teenager, the difference was that he had these feelings ten times worse and many more episodes of depression than a normal teenager. Evan tried without his medication but it obviously did not work. After a discussion about homework he left a note and committed suicide at the age of 16. This caused a lot of suffering for Evan’s family but during an episode of depression he could not understand how much this would hurt the people he loved. It was almost as if there were 2 Evans; a really happy one and a depressed one.

The Stroop Effect: Background

The Stroop Effect began as a dissertation for John Ridley Stroop. This experiment originates in 1885 in work done by J.M. Cattel. He stated that colors and objects took longer to name the word. Both experimenters were interested to know what caused the interference was between conflicting processes. Once he made his research, Stroop wanted to explain the interference. His study was based on 2 major questions. What effect each of the dimension stimulus would have trying to name the other dimension? Would practice have an effect on the interference? He created 3 experiments. Experiment #1 studied the effect of different ink color on reading words aloud. The results of this experiment was that participants averaged 2.3 seconds longer to read the words with the incompatible ink color. On experiment #2 the task was changed to naming the ink color of the words aloud. This time it was the same order as in the first experiment but te shapes where substituted for words. The results Ridley Stroop got out of this experiment was that the participants averaged 47 seconds longer to name the ink color of incompatible words than to name the solid-colored shapes. On experiment #3, 32 participant were supposed to practice and name the ink color of incongruent words for 8 days. Ridley Stroop wanted to find out whether practice affected the results. The results for this experiment was that time on incompatible words decreased with practice. The conclusions were that practice did make a difference. Also, he concluded that naming words activated a single reading response, while colors activated more responses. Naming colors was much more difficult that reading them in words. The Stroop Effect is a difficulty or interference when naming the color of an object when the color interferes with the name of the object. The Stroop Effect also states that participants have a difficulty eliminated any irrelevant information during a task. There is a variation in the Stroop Effect and it is that it may be tested through various experiments. it has been manipulated in various ways by experimenters. There has been many variations since Ridley’s findings. Other people that have influenced the Stroop Effect are MacLeond, Hamers, Regan, Arnoult, McCown, Eriksen and Seymour. There are many limitations for these critical trials. For example, acoustic relations can alter the results. Also, the interference begins until around 2nd grade and declines through adulthood until around 60 and then rises again. It is also more powerful in the dominant language of bilinguals. The explanations for these findings are that words are that words are read faster than colors are named. Two responses compete to be the response that is produced. We automatically read a word when it is there for us to read and colors are everywhere and we do not necessarily say the color in our head every time we see a different color. in conclusion, this interference found when incongruent data is together makes it more challenging for us.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment. The patient believes the placebo is a normal pharmacological substance that will cure their pain and because they believe it will in some cases it does even if it is a tablet without effect. This idea was presented by H.K. Beecher who evaluated 15 clinical trials with different problems and found that 35% of the people he tested were cured by a placebo alone and 66.7% of the patient’s conditions were improved. Since then, many studies have been done with higher results. These placebos have been effective for people with any pain, depression, heart ailments, gastric ulcers and other stomach issues. Many other studies were done concerning the efficiency of the placebo effect and some discuss it does not really work. Before real pharmaceutics medicine was used, there were only placebos. The limitations of the placeboes are that sometimes doctors don’t know if maybe the placebo is not going to be effective and may worsen the patient’s health. I think that for minor health problems such as a cold or depression the placebo effect might be efficient but for major diseases it should not prescribed. The placebo effect can also have many beneficial results so it should not be discarded because it can still be very cheap and easier for many people but it should also me accompanied by other medicines so that it is not risky.

These articles explain how gender and cultural differences affect the way and how long we retain memory. For example, Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Sweden discovered that women can remember more about everyday events than men. The results of their experiments indicated that women do extremely well in verbal episodic memory tasks and men were better than woman at visuospatial processing. To get to these conclusions the psychologists made an experiment in which three groups of participants where presented with black and white pictures of hairless, asexual faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The results show that women could remember the ‘female’ faces better than they could remember the ‘male’ faces. This shows us how gender affects memory in different ways.

Psychologist, Michelle Leichtman, tries to explain how different cultures have particular factors that may shape memory. She ives many examples. One of them is that if you ask someone tha comes from the Unisted States, a country that focuses a lot in their history, about the earliest memory they have they might tell you about some event when they were about 3. But if you ask the same thing to an Asian, a culture that values independence more than personal history, they will probably tell you about a memory they have when they were 4 or more. So, according to this we can observe that how long you retain a memory may vary depending on your culture. These discoveries have been results of studies made in the past. Mary Mullen and Harlene Hayne both did studies trying to find how differences between cultures affect memory. Mullen asked 700 Caucasians and Asians about their earliest memory and found an average difference that Caucasians’ memory was 6 moths earlier than Asian’s. Then Hayne found that Maoris’ culture helped them retain memory longer than Caucasians. To explain this Michelle Leichthman and some colleagues investigates and found that high-elaborative mothers talk a lot to their children about the past, while low-elaborative mothers don’t talk much about the past. So, they found that Maori mothers are high-elaborative mothers compared to Asian mothers. This explains to us how culture can affect our memory.

Alzheimer’s disease is a problem in the brain that affects your memory. The symptoms develop slowly and get worse through the years to a point that it interferes with daily activities. This disease is progressive and irreversible it slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability of completing basic tasks. When the disease is advanced the patient can no longer respond to the environment, they might become mute or stop eating. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of aging but as you get older the possibilities if having the disease increase. Most patients with Alzheimer’s are 65 or older. Alzheimer’s is one of the leading causes of death in America, but the most frightening part of the disease is that there is no current cure. Although there is no cure, there are some treatments that help slow down the worsening symptoms and improve the quality of life for the patients. The most common early symptom is having difficulty remembering new information. As the disease develops other symptoms may appear such as forgetting basic things you have done for your whole life. Another example of a symptom of a patient in the severe stage of Alzheimer’s is that the person may not be able to recognize his father or daughter. This disease is one of the priorities for many labs; it has been killing people for many years and will keep on doing if scientists don’t find a cure for it. It may be terrifying but it is the true, Alzheimer’s is an average person’s fear of getting older.