Psychology Studies

Aim: undestand Little Hans's phobias and to try and treat them.Try to prove oedipus Complex.Procedure: Case study of Litlle Hans, including dream analysis. Information was gathered from Litlle Han's father not from Hans himself. (father was a follower of Freuds beliefs). Freud met Hans twice and the study arose from the information gathered by Hans's mother and father who documented the information for Freud to analyse.Themes: Litlle Hans showed interest in his widdler (penis). he dreamt about widdlers and other children's widdlers. Another theme was that Hans seemed to want his father to disappear/ 'go away' on business trips. when family moved house to limit the time his father was away Hans wanted to kill his father. Hans was also very jealous of his sister, and agreed with Freud when he suggested Hans wished his mother would let the babies head fall under the water.Treatment of the phobia is the third theme within the case study. Hans said he was afraid a horse would bite him. He also feared black horses who had things covering their eyes, one when he was walking with his mother he saw a horse that had fallen down whilst drawing a bus.A further theme helps the analysis. When Hans played with dolls and 'having children' Hans stated that his mother was the childs mummy, Hans was their daddy and Hans's father the grandfather.Case Study Analysis: Freuds intepretations of Hans's thoughts and reactions:Hans's denial that he only thought of widdlers in his dreams was an example of repression, pushing unwanted desires into his uncosciousness.Hans dreamt about wiping bottoms because he had enjoyed that which showed he found pleasure in the anal stage.Hans wanted his father to 'go away' because he enjoyed having his mothers attention, the jealousy towards his sister was another example of his need to have his mothers attention.Hans's fear of white horses symbollic of his fear of his father. Fear of black things around the eyes an mouth represented adult men with moustaches and glasses, reinforcing the fact thatHans was afraid of his father.When girl was told not to touch the horse similar to Hans being told not to touch his widder, freud interpretated this as castration fear. When Hans played with the dolls and identified himself as the father and that his own father was the grandfather it showed Hans was now cured and that this was the resolution of the Oedipus Complex.Conclusion: Freud believed the study of Little Hans offered evidence that supports the stages of psychosexual stages and theory of how gender develops.Evaluation:Strengths --->Data was valid as Freud did try to work on direct information gathered from Little Hans when Hans talked freely abolut his issues, even if it was gathered through his father.Data was comprehensive and extremely rich in detail, information reported included covering of dreams, events, ideas and feelings. This enabled Freud to gather rich qualatative data that covered a variety of aspects of Hans's life.Weaknesses:Writing a case study s likely to contain sunjective intrpretation. If data is interpretated subjectively it may be interpretated differently by another analyst or researcher therefore the case study would not be reliable.The parents followed Freud's teaching and so the data may be biased and completely inaccurate as they knew what Freud was trying to find out, they may have supplied only the facts that supported Freud rather than all the detail.There are other exlanations, Bowlby (1973) who said a child needs their mother as an attatchment figure in their early years or their later development is affected. Hans may have clung to his mother because she had previously threatened to leave, he was scared of being abandoned.Freud's methods are not scientific because his concepts such as the uncosciousness and castration fear can not be measured and are not testable. Conclusions are not scientifically shown and not easily repeated so are unlikely to be reliable.

Dibs: Personality development in Play Therapy (Axline 1964)Aim: Axline a clinical psychologist aimed to help Dibs to unlock whatever was troubling him. Dibs would not speak to or interact with others, and could be aggressive if challenged. Procedure: She wrote up a case study about Dibs and his play therapy sessions. Case study was a description rather than a procedure and Axline tried not to intepret what Dibs said or did. Themes: Dibs showed he was an intelligent boy who could read spell and understand complex concepts.illustrating that he was not  being silent because he could not talk but instead because he chise not to commicatiel.He used toys and dolls in the play room to act out situations with his family. He showed hatred for his father when he burried a toy soldier he called 'papa'in the sand. He locked the dolls in play houses and showed how much he himself did not like to be locked in or left alone in places.Case Study Analysis:Dibs worked out his anger through play and seemed happier because of this. Axline did not use theory to explain Dib's behabiour but Freud's personality theory does help to explain Dib's ehaviours.One explanation os that Dibs had an over controlling superego and his ego did not manage to balanc the demands of the Id and Superego. His father used to lock him in his room which probably explained the reason Dib's disliked walls and locked doors. His mother had pushed and teased him when he was younger and and he didn't have much emotional support instead his mother used to continuously test his intelligence with constant stimulation. This might have led to his reaction to the testing, which was to maintain silent. Conclusions: Play therapy allowed Dibs to work through his feelings and allowed him to find himself!Play therapy enabled him to find the balance in his personality and ensure the superego became less controlling.EvaluationStrenghts -->Case study design meant that the data collected from Dibs was extremely rich in detail this information could potentialy hlp other.Reliability: the study can be replicated but because it is a case study the results may not be the same as individual is unique, control variables are hard to replicate, for instance Dib's home life is unique to him. Application: Play therapy in this case study illustrated how play can symolise many things, it is used today in criminal psychology especially when dealing with young witnesses that are required to give evidence. Validity: Axline tried not to influence Dib's play and tried to remain onjective. Ethics: Dibs was not his real name and so his identity was protected.Weaknesses:Generalisability: As it was a case study there was only 1 person . There is no guarentee that just because Dib's reacted in such a way to play therapy that other choldren would react in the same way. The results could be unique for just one person.Reliability: reliability of the case study is questionnableas the way in which the data is analysed can affect the results of the study, different interpretations mean its harder to replicate.Application: play therapy requires interpretation which could potentially be subjective.Validity: No objective way of knowing that Axlline intepretated Dib's play correctly. Ecological validity is also questionable as we don't know how the room was set up, did Dib's pick his own toys, were the toys supplied, was there any suggestions given to Dibs as to which toys he should play with. if any of things did happen it can be arguedthat there were subtle hints as to what interpretations were going to be made if #Dib;s played with a particular toy.Ethics: dib's feelings may have been wrongly intepretated and so are misrepresentative. Also Dib's would not have been able to give his informed consent.

Aim: Money wanted to investigate sex reassignment, to see if a baby born genetically male (XY) could be raised as a girl. Procedure/Description: Money studied 45 cases of children raised as the opposite gender, but most unique was the case of Bruce/Brenda. At the age of 7 months, Bruce and his twin brother went for an operation to be circumscised . Unfortunately during the operation Bruce's penis was burnt off and had to be removed. Bruce's parents saw Dr Money on TV talking about sex reasignments and they contacted him. After meeting up it was decided that Brue would now be raised as a girl, Brenda. Over the duration of 9 years Brenda, her brother, Brian and her parents had interviews with Dr Money where he gathered data. Brenda was dressed as a girl, given female hormones (oestrogen) and underwent surgery to be given female looking genitalia. Money found that although Brenda had tomboyish qualities (assumed to be a resulty of her imitating he rtwin brother) she did identify herslef as a girl. She copied her mother's behaviour rather than her father's; said she wanted to be a teacher when she was older and at christmas she asked for dolls (whereas her brother asked for cars).Conclusion: On the basis of these findings, Money concluded that Brenda had been successfully reasigned gender from male to female and stated that we are all born 'gender neutral' and our gender can be assigned through nurture and upbringing. Suggesting Nurture is stronger than nature.Evaluation:Strengths -->Qualitative data was collected from a variety of sources, Brenda, Brian and tboth parents. The data collected especially from Brenda was full of detail and so therefore can be analysed in depth.This means the results are more valid because they are so rich in data. More than one person contributed to the collection of the data, the mother carried out lots of the observations and father backed uop her evidence by either agreeing with her descriptoons or disagreeing them. Different methods of collecting data, observations from family members but also personal accounts from Brenda as well as interviews conducted by Dr money himslef. this increases the reliability as data was collected from a variety of sources. Weaknesses -->Davud Reimar denied Money's conclusions. He stated the findings were invalid because they did not represent the situation at the time. this is shown asalthough Money said it was possible to assign gender after birth at the age of 14 David decided he did not want to live as a girl and changed his sex back to male. He lived as a man for the rest of his life. Disproving Money's conclusions.It's difficult to generalise the findings as the situation was extremely unique, for exampl David later developed mental issues and suffered from depression, this was not necessarily caused by the sex reasignment but may have been due to genetics. This just shows how each unique case can't be compared with others as there is no link between the 2.Not everyone would face the same situations/circumstnaces if they underwent sex reasignment procedures as in some cases it does work and some people live a better life in their new gender. It depends on the person and is why the results of this particular case study can not be generalised.

Aim: to see if the brain activity of murderers who pleaded guilty be reasons of insanity is different to that of a control group.Procedure: 82 PPS, 39 men and 2 women in each group. First group all murderers and the other the contol. It was a matched pairs design with Pps being matched on gender, age and schitophrenia. The Pps were given a PET scan: they were all injected with radio active tracer and then asked to participate in a continuous performance task. They were then scanned.Findings: The study found that there was less glucose metabolism in the prefrontal cortex of the murderers, this suggests that the murderers had less control over their moral compass and that they had less control over their descion making centre. They also found less activity in the corpus collosum in murderers, suggesting there was less of link beween the 2 hemispheres, left side (logical side) had less control over the right (the emotional side).Conclusions: Raine concluded that there was a difference in brain activity between Murderers who had pleaded guilty by means of insanity and the control group of non-murderers. This suggests that there might be a biological reason as to why murderers commit criminal behaviour.Evaluation:Strengths -->PET scans are an objective measurement which is based on scientific techniques. Meaning that intepretation of results is not required limiting the possibility of bias.The experiment is extremely reliable as it was undertaken in lab conditions, which meant there were strict controls implemented for example all Pps were detoxed 2 weeks before taking part and the time given for the continuous performance task was kept constant. This meant the experiment is replicable as if repeated we can be pretty certain that the same results would be found.Weaknesses -->the study only takes into account the correlation between brain abnormalities and criminal behaviour, it disregards other factors that could influence the behaviour of the Pps, for example the reason for criminal behaviour may not be brain function but could be contributed to by the area in which the PPs were raised, if it was an area with a high level of crime this could be te reason for criminal behaviour in adulthood rather than brain abnomalities. Hard to generalise the results as the majority of the Pps in the study were male, (78 men and 4 female) and they were all american. People of a different nationalities brain's may function in a different way.The results were representative of the jail population though, as there are less female prisoners that have pleaded guilty by means of insanity if convicted of murder.

Aim: To see if Albert could be conditioned to dislike (be scared of) a white rat, which had previously been a loved pet .They used the theory of classical conditioning in order to explain the fear that is linked to an otherwise liked stimulus.Procedure: Controlled observation was used on one participant, Little Albert. A diary was kept over the course of a month to record emotional respones.Albert wasa normal child and so the experimenters did not believe he would react adversely to the stimulus.Stage 1: Experimenters determined Albert was not afraid of rats, this was important as they needed to be neutral stimuli which did not causes an effect in Albert. They then tested the loud noise of banging together metal bars, this illicited a fear response. Albert's feasr was shown through his startled behaviour which included lip trembling and tears.The experimenters decided to test : whether a fear could be conditioned to the ratwhether the fear would be generalised to other stimulihow long the learning would last and could the extinguish the fear.Conditioning Trial: As Albert went to touch the rat, the loud crashing of the bars would sound, ALbert showed fear. This was repeated and then left for one week. After the week Albert went to touch the rat but withdrew his hand before he touched it. This was repeated and by the 7th trial ALbeert crawled away when presented with the rat.Stage 2: the fear response had been established, the generalising hypothesis was tested, could this fear be associated with other white fluffy/furry objects? Building blocks were used instead of the metal rods, but no fear was shown but when presented with a rabbit, cotton wool and a fur coat Albert did show signs of fear. Illustrating that fear had been generalised to furry objects and not just the rat.Stage 3: they transferred Albert to a large lecture hall and still he showed a fear response when faced with the rat. This showed that learning can be transferred to another context.Stage 4: At 13 months, (2 months on) ALbert still showed the fear response when shown the rat, santa clauses beard and rabbit, but there was still NO fear with the building blocks.Conclusion: the learnt fear does last and it can be generalised, as well as being present in new contexts.Evaluation:Strengths --> Principles of the study have been used in development for treatments for phobias.The experiment was undertaken in a lab setting and so all extraneous variables were controlled, this increases the ability to replicate the study as the variables can be kept constant. Provides evidence that the theory of classical conditioning is true. Albert was successfully conditioned to ilicit a fear response every time he was faced with the rat. A rat which had previously enjoyed playing with. He successfuly been taught to associate the loud noise (fear) with the rat.Weaknesses -->Unethical, Watson and Raynor deliberately caused distress to Albert. This is against ethical guidelines today as scientists have to protect the welfare of their PPs and not cause them harm. ALso some would argue that leaving Albert in the state that all whit animals scared him for the rest of his life was irresponsible and could potential have a serious effect on the rest of ALberts life.The results can not be generalised as Albert was the only participant and so they can not be certain that just because classical condition was successful for Little Albert, it may not be successful for a different participant. Thereofre there is not enough supporting evidence to truly say the theory would work on all types of people.The study also lacks ecological validity as it was carried out under lab conditions this means that events that occured were unrealistic and Albert would not have been subjective to continuous loud noise and white rats in everyday life. Results were only measured by the quantity of Alberts responses raher than the quality of them, the results were not collated in good enough detail for valid conclusions to be drawn.  

Little Hans

Axline (Dibs)

Dr Money

Watson and Raine

Little Albert