How is the physiological approach reductionist

The behaviorist approach to psychology focuses on how interactions with the environment contribute to learning and human behavior. This reductionism approach ignores other factors such as cognition and biology in favor of simply focusing on environmental influences. A behaviorist might look at a psychological condition in terms of how present behavior has been caused by past learning.

To treat the condition, a behaviorist would recommend utilizing behavior modification techniques to weaken old associations and form new ones. The cognitive approach focuses on studying how internal mental processes can be carefully and objectively studied. This approach is reductionist because it focuses only on cognitions and neglects other factors that might contribute to behavior.

They might recommend a treatment approach centered on changing the unhealthy cognitions in order to replace them with more positive, realistic ones. The reductionist approach to science is frequently contrasted with the holistic approach, which approaches things as a whole rather than focusing on the individual parts.

The holistic approach does not discount the importance of each individual component but instead suggests that understanding the whole requires looking at how these parts work on different levels as well as how they interact and influence one another.

There are many areas of psychology that tend to take a more holistic approach to the science of human thought and behavior.

Social psychology , humanistic psychology , and positive psychology , for example, are more focused on understanding how people function on the whole rather than simply looking at a tiny slice of the human experience. Critics of reductionism often suggest that the approach oversimplifies complex things, but this does not mean that the reductionist approach is not useful.

Human behavior is often so varied and complex that breaking certain things down into smaller parts allows researchers a way to understand problems in different ways. While relying solely on reductionism might lead to gaps in knowledge, using this approach to learn more about some topics can be quite useful and informative.

Whether a more reductionist or holistic approach would be the most beneficial way to think about the problem often depends upon the specific topic and situation. Ever wonder what your personality type means? Sign up to find out more in our Healthy Mind newsletter. Systems biology, emergence and antireductionism. Saudi J Biol Sci. Miller GA. Mistreating Psychology in the Decades of the Brain. Perspect Psychol Sci.

Bakker GM. A new conception and subsequent taxonomy of clinical psychological problems. BMC Psychol. Biological Perspectives on Psychiatry for the Person. Int J Pers Cent Med. Abramson CI. Behav Sci Basel. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind.

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Furthermore, it could also be explained in terms of cultural norms and expectations. This was illustrated by Souweidane and Huesmann , who found that Detroit High School children who had been born in the United States were more accepting of aggression than children who had emigrated from the Middle East, especially if they did so after the age of An interactionist approach argues that several levels of explanation are necessary to explain a particular behaviour, ranging from lower biological to higher levels social and cultural.

Interactionism is subtly different to holism see below , as interactionism considers how different levels of explanation interact, whereas holism is more concerend with understanding the whole experience, rather than individual explanations.

Company Reg no: VAT reg no Main menu. Subjects Shop Courses Live Jobs board. For example, research into the genetic basis on mental disorders has enabled researchers to identify specific genes believed to be responsible for schizophrenia. This way a reductionist approach enables the scientific causes of behavior to be identified and advances the possibility of scientific study.

A reductionist approach to studying mental disorders has led to the development of effective chemical treatments. However, some would argue that the reductionist view lacks validity. For instance, we can see how the brain responds to particular musical sounds by viewing it in a scanner, but how you feel when you hear certain pieces of music is not something a scanner can ever reveal.

Just because a part of the brain that is connected with fear is activated while listening to a piece of music does not necessarily mean that you feel afraid. For example, they can explain that running away from a large dog was made possible by our fear centers causing a stress response to better allow us to run fast, but the same reductionist view cannot say why we were afraid of the dog in the first place. In effect, by being reductionist we may be asking smaller, more specific questions and therefore not addressing the bigger issue of why we behave as we do.

It has been suggested that the usefulness of reductionist approaches depends on the purpose to which they are put. For example, investigating brain response to faces might reveal much about how we recognize faces, but this level of description should not perhaps be used to explain human attraction.

Likewise, whilst we need to understand the biology of mental disorders, we may not fully understand the disorder without taking account of social factors which influence it. Interactionism is an alternative approach to reductionism, focusing on how different levels of analysis interact with one another. It differs from reductionism since an interactionism approach would not try to understand behavior from explanations at one level, but as an interaction between different levels.

So for example, we might better understand a mental disorder such as depression by bringing together explanations from physiological, cognitive and sociocultural levels.

Such an approach might usefully explain the success of drug therapies in treating the disorder; why people with depression think differently about themselves and the world; and why depression occurs more frequently in particular populations. McLeod, S. What is reductionism.