Pearson - DISTINCTION Unit 11 Psychological Perspectives for Health and Social Care.Aim and purpose:
This unit aims to enable learners to understand the different psychological approaches that can be used
when studying and in particular how these can be used to study health and social care. This ...
Pearson - DISTINCTION Unit
Psychological Perspectives for
Health and Social Care
, Introduction
Aim and purpose:
This unit aims to enable learners to understand the different psychological approaches that can be used
when studying and in particular how these can be used to study health and social care. This unit
highlights the different psychological perspectives and encourages learners to apply these approaches to
the study of health and social care. The value of psychological studies to the understanding of health and
social care will also be examined. Learners will initially consider the meaning of the term ‘theories’ in the
context of psychology, and will begin to appreciate the diversity of psychological theories as they
progress through the unit. Learners will examine the principal psychological perspectives and then apply
them to the health and social care.
On completion of this unit a learner should:
1 Understand psychological perspectives
2 Understand psychological approaches to health and social care.
Scenario:
You are a psychology student who would like to have a career as an educational psychologist. On your
workplace experience you have been asked to investigate the need for a new, larger therapy and
counselling centre for the service users in your locality. You ultimately need to evaluate two
psychological approaches to health and social care provision and put forward your findings and suggest
what new provision is needed for your locality.
2
, Task 1 The principal psychological perspectives
The main psychological perspectives
An approach is a perspective that involves certain assumptions about human behaviour, the way
they function, which aspects of them are worthy of study and what research methods are
appropriate for undertaking this study. There may be several different theories within an
approach but they all share these common assumptions. Sometimes people wonder why there
are so many different psychology perspectives and whether one approach is correct and others
wrong. Most psychologists would agree that no one perspective is correct, although in the past
in the early days of psychology, the behaviourist would have said their perspective was the only
true scientific one.
The psychological perspective is the result of a synthesis of cognitive and behavioral psychology
theories. In this tradition of research, three strategies are clear: (1) the adoption of attitude
change as the most interesting dependent variable, (2) the modeling of communication (i.e.,
persuasion) as a special case of behavioral learning theory, and (3) the reliance on experimental
social psychology for conceptual and methodological research strategies. The basic
communication model proposed by Hovland and Janis (1959) conceived of the communication
situation in terms of message content, source identity, type of channel, and setting operating
through pre dispositional factors (situational elements that determine what audience members
attend to and how) and internal mediating processes (attention, comprehension, and
acceptance) in order to produce observable communication effects (changes in opinion,
perception, affect, and action). The challenge of a message was to gain the receiver’s interest,
then produce the intended effect with understandable and memorable content. The receiver’s
interest, of course, could be affected by external qualities of the subject of communication or
sender, as well as internal interests, beliefs, and cognitive processing capacities (Andersen,
1972). Thus, the model retained the linear notion of technical communication theories but
adopted a strong emphasis on the effects component of the communication process.
Main psychological perspectives are:
● Behaviourist approach
● Social learning theory
● Psychodynamic perspective
● Biological approaches
● Humanist approach
3
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