Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura: Developed the Social Cognitive Theory of Depression that states that an individuals personality is molded by behavior, thought, and the environment . Each piece in a puzzle can and does affect the shape of the other pieces . Bandura believes that environment plays a greater role in shaping our behavior than genetics , because human behavior ends up being largely a result of learning , which may occur by observation and through direct experience . 

Juliann Rotter:Developed the social learning theory that stated that personality represents an interaction of the individual with his or her environment . One cannot speak of a personality , internal to the individual , that is independent of the environment . One cannot focuses on behabior as being an automatic response to an objective set of a environmental stimuli. Rather to understand behavior , one must take both the individual , his or her life history of learning experiences and the environmental those stimuli that the person is aware to respond to . Rotter describes personality as a relatively stable set of potentials for responding to situations in a particular way.

Martin Seligman:Learned helplessness is the state of mind created when an animal or human being learns to behave helplessly, even with the means to escape or avoid an unpleasant situation. According to Seligman the learned helplessness theory holds that clinical depression and other mental illnesses may arise from the perceived lack of control over a situation.

Aaron Beck:According to Dr. Aaron Beck, negative thoughts, generated by dysfunctional beliefs are typically the primary cause of depressive symptoms. A direct relationship occurs between the amount and severity of someone's negative thoughts and the severity of their depressive symptoms. In other words, the more negative thoughts you experience, the more depressed you will become.

Bib:

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=13006&cn=5

http://directory.leadmaverick.com/Helping-Psychology/DallasFort-WorthArlington/TX/10/9748/index.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

      

Frontal Lobotomy : Walter Freeman

The field of mental health suffers weird offbeat and arguably despicable characters, but in the earlier 2000 the father of lobotomy appeared. This father was called Walter Freeman, that performed about 3,000 lobotomies over his long career. That took this procedure , Walter lifted the patients eyelid and inserted an leucotome through a tear duct . A few taps with a surgical hammer breached the bone . Freeman took a position behind the patients head , pushed the leucotome about an inch and a half into the frontal love of the patients brain , and moved the sharp tip back and forth .Then he repeated the procedure for the other eye socket .Freeman attended to Yale University and to Pennsylvania University of medicine. Concerned with the tragedy of wasted lives in mental hospitals, he introduced insulin shock therapy and ECT for patients in the George Washington University Hospital. When he found that chimpanzees became passive when their frontal loves were damaged . 

So he decided to start try Portuguese physician and neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz’s procedure . This experiments started with his colleague James Watts that started practicing on brains from the hospital morgue . In 1936 they were ready for their first patient called Mrs. Hammatt who was 63 years old , who suffered from agitated depression and sleeplessness . The procedure of the experiment of Moniz consisted of entering the frontal lobes through the eye sockets, and for that they drilled six holes into the top of her skull. The operation of Mrs. Hammatt was successful she could go to the movies and watch the movie normally , and she lived five years more . Freeman and Watts claimed that 52 percent of their first surgeries had good results, but they did not offer a clinical yardstick for what constituted an improvement for patients brains . Patients often had to be re taught how to do many basic things like eating and going to the bathroom. Relapses were common, and three percent died from the procedure. President Kennedy’s sister was mentally ill and Freeman attended her. Freeman operated Rosemary from the frontal lobe but she died after that because she need full time care. Freeman believed lobotomies worked because the procedure severed connections between the frontal lobes of the brain and the thalamus , he thought it was the seat of human emotion . Although his theories have been not given so much credit , he was one of the few psychiatrists of the era who believed that mental illness had a physical biological component . I n his final stages of his career of lobotomy he had his license removed after killing a patient , Freeman had fallen and society really didn’t needed him because pills for mental illness were invented . 

http://www.mcmanweb.com/lobotomy.html

Boy Interrupted Reflection

Boy Interrupted is about Evan Perry's bipolar disorder and his sudden death at the age of 15 . When were talking about bipolar disorder we are talking about a phenomenon thats so big that it can cause death . Bipolar disorder is a serious brain illness , that swings a person's emotions from high and irritable to sad and hopeless and then back with periods of normal mood in between . This brain disorder usually starts in adolescence or in adulthood years . In this case for Evan Perry it started in his early years of life , like when he was five years old . Evan's firsts thoughts of death were shown when he was five by talking with his mother about various detailed ways of how he would kill himself . When Evan gets to fifth grade he gets to a professional doctor to back up the disorder . Then life for the Perry's started looking tough with Evan's brothers hoping that Evan will make it through life with his bipolar disorder . Evan;s doctor prescribed lithium for his disorder , but when Evan stopped taking it and went back with death ideas . Finally Evan jumped off the window of their apartment in Manhattan when he had only fifteen years . In his computer besides his bed he had left his suicidal note , with why and why not bullet points for what he would live .

In my opinion I think that this documental about bipolar disorder was though for the audience like me and for all families that have bipolar carriers . This is because we see the death of a carrier of bipolar disorder so it creates a more controversial point . This video was shocking but gives a thought of hope for all the people that have bipolar disorder . 

Loftus and Palmer experiment

Procedure:

1.Get the 20 participants from the American School .

2.The students are shown 7 clips of 5 to 30 seconds long.

3.The students are asked to write about what they have just seen .

4.The students are now asked 5 critical questions (4 for each ) having to do with the speed of the vehicle in the collision . 

Condition 1: 'About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?'

Condition 2: 'About how fast were the cars going when they collided into each other?'

Condition 3: 'About how fast were the cars going when they bumped into each other?'

Condition 4: 'About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?

Condition 5: 'About how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?'

5.Pick up the results of the 5 conditions and end the experiment

Internal Assesment : Eye-witness reports: Loftus and Palmer (1974)

The Loftus & Palmer study was a psychological study carried out by Elizabeth Loftus and Palmer in 1974. The aim of the study was to investigate whether or not an eyewitness’s memory can be changed by information supplied to them after an event. Loftus and Palmer also wished to discover whether or not a person's memory can be influenced by this information.

The purpose of the study was to determine how memory is influenced by circumstances and prompting surrounding memory storage and recall. Previous studies had established that memories were not necessarily accurate representations of actual events but were actually constructed using past experiences and other influences. Loftus & Palmer carried out two studies. The first was tested on forty-five students split into five categories, each with nine students. The second was carried out on one hundred and fifty students. In the first study forty-five students from the University of Washington were shown seven film clips of car accidents. The clips ranged from five to thirty seconds long. After viewing each clip the students were asked to write a report on what they had seen. They were asked a series of questions about the videos. The critical question in this study was "At what speed was the car traveling?" The five categories of students were asked this question but with a different verb. Loftus and Palmer wanted to see if the verb influenced the students answers.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is an observable improvement in health or behavior no treated by a medication or administered treatment. Placebo is a substance that produces and effect similar to the active substance or to an antibiotic. Most common placebos may be , fake surgery and fake therapies .

The idea of the placebo effect originated with the scientist H.K Beecher. Beecher found out that about 35 percent of 1085, patients who took a pill containing no active ingredients experienced an improvement in their condition. 
In ten out of fifteen studies made by Beecher , 67 percent of the patients seemed to improve as a normal course of there illness and not attributable to placebo. In another study, a third of the patient’s symptoms improved with a placebo for treating there colds.  Another of Beecher’s studies was that when he took drug treatment to their patients and change it with placebo , instead of worsen there symptoms it improved them , because the actual drugs caused side effects that the placebo didn’t.

There are a lot of factors that can affect many treatments and the evaluation of those treatments. That make it very difficult to be sure just what it is about an involvement that produces improvement or superficial improvement. An example of these factors is that Beecher only showed the percentage of the patients that improve their conditions not of the percentage that didn’t improved with placebo effect.

Finally I think that the placebos are fake substances that make our minds thinks were improving but we are not , it might be good in some cases , and bad in others. It can be bad , because not always imaginary treatment can treat like a real treatment does , that’s because not all injuries or viruses are easily treated , and more if treated only mentally . “Vitamins and herbs are real. Placebos are only imaginary.”

Are All Memories Alike? Gender/Cultural Differences

Sex Differences In Memory: Women Better Than Men At Remembering Everyday Events

There have always been a difference between men and women , beginning  with the physical part ending with the mental part . Scientists from Sweden proved that the differences between men and women or sex differences have todo a lot with episodic memory , and have proven that women are better in episodic memory . First women are better in episodic memory tasks like remembering word , pictures about things . Like if a couple would get lost , the men would remember how to escape and the women where she left the keys or were is there cellphone . Men are better at remembering symbolic non-linguistic things.


Women can remember facial features better , like in a test were various faces were given to females , they had to recall the faces . The results show that in between the female,male, or just faces options the women pointed more in the female faces . This shows that women can identify better female faces than rather males.  Women can do better the task of recognizing familiar odors , than man . A variable that affects this sex differences can be education .


The results say that female are better at episodic memory , at specific events . The probability of genetically based memories between male and female are not known still .

The culture of memory

Kids when are little , might have 2 to 4 years when they don't really remember about the events that happened . This situation is called childhood amnesia . Researchers had discovered various ways that kids remember events since childhood  between different cultures all over the world . 

The difference between cultures , like with american children and asian children .People who grew up in societies that focus more on personal history, like the US, will have earlier childhood memories than those people who grew up in an environment whose value interdependence is placed above those of personal history, like Asia.

An important model called the social-interaction model meant that our autobiographical memories don't develop just away , but we develop them when we are children and recall them with adults over again , enabling us to remember with more detail.

There an abundant of experiments explaining this cultural differences affecting memory . Some are studying Chinese-American immigrants to see how their early childhood memories compare with those of native Chinese and native Americans.  Here is the scientist Leitchman explaining its findings  "Right now we're really refining it and working out the wide variety of mechanisms that cause it."


Sites:

http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm