Download ao2 behaviourist - Beauchamp Psychology

A further strength of the behaviourist approach to psychopathology is that it has
research evidence to support it.
For example, Watson and Rayner (1920) found that Little Albert (an 11 month old
child) learned to associate a white rat with fear when that object was presented
accompanied by a loud noise.
This empirical evidence demonstrates how classical conditioning can explain the
learning of abnormal behaviours such as phobias.
A strength of the behaviourist approach is that it overcomes the ethical issue of
labelling a person as ‘abnormal’ (as the biological approach would).
For example, rather than diagnosing an individual as having an ‘illness’ and
thereby stigmatizing this person, the behaviourist approach concentrates on
behaviour and whether it is adaptive or maladaptive.
This means that the approach assumes that maladaptive learned behaviour can
be replaced with new adaptive learned behaviour, and therefore individuals can
be treated effectively (as opposed to the biological approach which assumes the
individual will always suffer from the psychological disorder).
A further limitation of the behaviourist approach is that it can be accused of being
reductionist and simplistic.
For example, it seeks to explain very complex psychological disorders in very
narrow terms, such as breaking down behaviour into a simple component such as
stimulus-response mechanisms.
This means that the approach oversimplifies human behaviour by ignoring the
role of more complex interactions between factors such as biology, emotion,
thinking or childhood experiences.
However, critics of the behaviourist approach argue that it ignores the underlying
causes of abnormal behaviour.
For example, psychodynamic psychologists would claim that the symptoms of
mental disorders (e.g. phobias or depression) are the expression of an underlying
emotional problem which shows itself in another way.
This means that the behaviourist approach only focuses on external causes of
behaviour within the environment rather than searching for internal psychological
causes in the unconscious mind caused by childhood experiences.