overview of latest psychology

[paulend]

Can anyone give me an overview of the latest thoughts in the area of psychology. Is the cognitive model still looked upon as the leading model?

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[PsyDRxPnow]

I hope so because I have recently deiced on the Cognitive/behavioral model as my mode/philosophical way of practicing.

 

[lazure]

It depends on the population you work with. For child work CBT is quite important but so is family systems. There's also a lot of emphasis of the psychodynamic model, which actually does have surprisingly common themes with the behavioural model....

 

[paulend]

I hope so because I have recently deiced on the Cognitive/behavioral model as my mode/philosophical way of practicing.

What are the elements of the cognitive model that you practice? When you say "behavioral" is that part of the cognitive model or is it a separate behavioral science?

Thanks

 

[JatPenn]

cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and cognitive therapy (popularized by aaron beck) are two separate schools of thought, though the have their similarities.

 

[paulend]

would a cognitive model suggest that behaviour happens because of feelings within the body/ "states of mind"/thoughts?

Does it also suggest that thoughts/memories are "stored" within the brain and then once stored they can be brought forth and used?

If this is the case I am tending to disagree and would be grateful if somebody could provide a good argument for the cognitive model so I can see arguments from both sides.

Thanks

 

[paulend]

Yeah, me too. I think memories/thoughts are stored in the elbow.

Then unfortunately you are incorrect also.

 

[paulend]

My emphasis above is on the term "stored". My tendency to disagree is with regard to this term, I do not see what the things are that are said to be stored.

Also, what evidence points toward the conclusion that memories, for example, are stored? With learning, is storage said to occur simply because once a situation in the organisms life has occurred and the organism can now behave with different skills with respect to that situation, that the organism is said to have "stored information" and now uses that information when a similar situation occurs?

 

[50960]

There is ample evidence that material is stored in the brain. A good course in cognitive psych as well as biological psych will help you understand this much better.

 

[paulend]

How the hell else would you be able to recall information?

Is there some entity called strength "stored" in a muscle after weight training that then allows the muscle to lift greater weights? The muscle is changed by the lifting of weight and then acts as a changed muscle allowing it to lift greater weight at a later time. The signals received by the brain from the senses change the brain, the brain then acts as a changed organ when similar situations arise thus allowing it to do more with regard to the stimuli that changed it. There is no entity called "information" stored in the brain. What happens when you have forgotten somebody's phone number? Has this supposed information disappeared? Or has it been misplaced? Or are the current stimuli from the senses not sufficiently similar to those which caused the brain to change when the phone number was first "acquired", therefore not allowing the organism to display the behaviour of the phone number? A person does not need to do anything that they would call complex/difficult if they know the phone number, they just say it, but if the phone number has been "forgotten", that is to say that the usual response of the phone number is not occurring, then the person may change the stimuli that they receive by the senses so that a successful response is more likely. These different stimuli do not somehow allow the "stored information" to be found, they just set up similar stimuli to those that usually occur around the time when the response of the phone number is displayed therefore using the part of the brain that leads to the response of the phone number being displayed.

 

[50960]

You are partially correct, especially when we are talking about procedural memory tasks. However, this does not explain STM functioning in any way. There is alot we don't know about memory, but there is also alot of both psychological, biochemical and neurophysiology data that you have clearly not incorporated.

 

[paulend]

You are partially correct, especially when we are talking about procedural memory tasks. However, this does not explain STM functioning in any way. There is alot we don't know about memory, but there is also alot of both psychological, biochemical and neurophysiology data that you have clearly not incorporated.

With regard to short term memory: If you are defining this as the organisms ability to be able to, for example, repeat a long sentence after only a small period of exposure to it, then the success of the organism in completing the task will be a function of what has occurred to the organism in the past (is the person a copy-typist who has had a huge amount of exposure to similar stimuli?), and the genetics of the individual (does their brain change quicker than say the "average" brain?) If the organism has had a huge amount of exposure to stimuli that are similar to the current stimuli that are to be "remembered" then the part of the brain that is used for the task will be sufficiently different to a brain that has not been exposed, therefore allowing for the organism to complete the task to a higher level. Obviously the make-up of the brain will play an important part. It is obviously demonstrated that organisms differ in their ability to "change" i.e. people differ in their ability to become physically stronger or faster and the same would be the case with the brain. If a brain has the ability to change at a quicker rate then it will get to a further stage of development before a brain that changes slower (It is not to say that the slower brain cannot get to the same level but it will just take a longer period of exposure to the stimuli). Therefore if the brain has reached a further stage of development it will be more likely to respond in the correct manner to a "short term memory problem" as said above.

With regard to the aspects that I have not included: I agree that it is a complex process, and that the biochemical reactions are very important, but this is biology, it is showing what the brain does, it does not need the term "information" to do this. These terms such as "knowledge" and "information" are used by psychologists, there is no entity called "information" stored in the brain like there is no light stored in a light-bulb, and if neuropsychology wishes to be partnered with the biological science of the brain then it needs to stop using these terms, otherwise it will keep looking in the wrong places for an explanation of behaviour.

 

[LM02]

Coincidentally, I came across a website this afternoon and immediately remembered this thread. I hope it can be useful in explicating some of your questions about this extremely broad area of psychology:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/jul2001/996557511.Ns.r.html

Incidentally, if the original poster was inquiring about the "cognitive model" of psychotherapy, this is a related, but different topic all together.

 

[50960]

Thanks Paendrag! I neither had the energy nor the expertise to lay it all out for this person, who to me sounds alot like an undergrad psych student...or Bill Clinton questioning the meaning of the word "is"!

 

[paulend]

Yeah, except that you are wrong There are cells that only respond to the number six, for example. Also, language in general serves as a proxy for other things. It is how we communicate. When we explore concepts like prospective memory, implicit memory, declarative memory, working memory, sensory memory etc. . ., it is done with the understanding that we are describing organic systems. You are railing against something when there is no need. In Alzheimer's disease, we know that the cholinergic system deteriorates generally starting with the Nucleus of Meinert. We know that aspects of the hippocampus deteriorate, that temporal lobe atrophy occurs, etc. . . We also know the behavioral consequences of this, namely, anomia, memory consolidation deficits, anosmia, etc. . . We apply language to describe brain-behavior relationships because we are human and that's how we communicate. To take general constructs, like "information," and argue that use of said term is the problem with psychology is a silly argument and shows a cursory understanding of cognitive neuroscience and methodologies for elucidating various memory concepts.

I agree that my experience of the cognitive model is very limited, but that is why I came on this forum to try to get some answers. I think that the language used is very important to the analysis of problems and to say that "knowledge is stored" is using a metaphor as scientific terminology, which is totally unhelpful when describing a problem. "Knowledge" is a nonexistent entity and to hear it used by a decipline that links itself with biological brain science makes it sound utterly unscientific. The explanation in the middle of your quote above are with regard to deterioration of physical parts of the brain, which is biology. It would be foolish to take issue with such biological terms used as part of a biological science, e.g. neuroscience, but these terms are names of physical parts of the brain and my argument is not with the biology, it is with the psychology. The brain obviously functions in certain ways, a lot of which we do not know, but if you are going to describe these functions they need to be done by biologists and explain what is actually going on in a physiological sense. To then invent terms such as "store knowledge" to describe say, a biochemical reaction, seems to me totally absurd.

 

[paulend]

It is therefore not my point to take issue with the chemical etc..processes of the brain described by biology the same as I do not take issue with the biological processes of the heart described by biology. My intended discussion was on the subject of psychology and specifically the model used by cognitive psychology to describe what is supposedly occurring when people behave. My standing is that the brain is part of the body and functions as part of the body by means of biochemical processes. People behave in given ways but there is no initiating/originating agent within the brain that acts as a cause of an organism's behaviour and for cognitive psychology to try to create processes using terminology that does not adequately describe physiological processes put forward by biology seems misleading and will take it in the wrong direction e.g. using the computer as a model.

 

[paulend]

To take your computer analogy into account, what is the most parsimonious way to understand what it does? Turn it on, right? To say information is stored in the brain is not incorrect, nor does it take away or obscure understanding of biological mechanisms. It doesn't give a whole lot of information about memory process either. I suggest you read some of Charles Baddeley's research/theorizing on working memory. Working memory is a construct that was generated by cognitive psychology.

Indeed, to see what a computer does you can turn it on, but you are only observing exactly that, what it does. Using a computer for word processing does not tell me anything about the magnetic processes used by the hard disk which allows me to access my work at a later date. In this example the magnetic processes would be analogous to the chemical workings of the brain but the things it does would be analogous to behaviour.

Can I then ask you what "information" actually is as a separate entity? If you were to describing processes on a scientific/engineering level of the magnetic processes that occur in a hard disk, would you talk about "stored information" or how the magnetic field of the head changes the magnetism of the disk?

 

[paulend]

I though I was clear. Perhaps not. You are talking about different levels of scientific inquiry. Relative to your question about the engineer, they would talk about changes in the physical properties of the hard drive that allow STORAGE of information. Again, I advise you to delve a little deeper into what cognitive psychologists have tried to do. Read one of Daniel Schacter's books on memory. You are right, for a complete view, we cannot consider nebulous constructs independent of the context of biology. However, we also cannot consider the biology independent of the behavior.

Yes I understand what you are saying but I would still have to disagree with regard to the hard disk, I would say that a true description of what is happening would be "changes in the physical properties of the hard drive that allow" for the computer to display certain things such as pictures/sounds that are the same as the pictures/sounds that originally caused the physical properties to change.

Thanks for the book recommendations but I'm still not convinced

 

[paulend]

Could I be given an example of what is said to be going on when someone is, say, sitting down and then gets up and gets a glass of water? (using the latest model)

Thanks