Outline and evaluate psychological explanations for OCD Essay

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Published: 25.12.2019 | Words: 494 | Views: 541
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The cognitive way assumes that OCD can be described as consequence of faulty and irrational means of thinking taken to an extreme. Individuals with OCD have different pondering patterns and more intrusive thoughts. The intellectual explanation tensions that all of us have unwanted thoughts from time to time, nevertheless OCD victims cannot ignore these thoughts and they are often misinterpreted, bringing about self-blame as well as the obsessive indications of OCD.

So that the negative thoughts and concerns associated with a particular panic do not arrive to pass, compulsions arise so that they can neutralise’ the anxiety. The sufferer becomes more cautious about having intrusive thoughts and their fear of all of them increases. Mainly because these ideas are constantly thought about, they become obsessive and a style of ritualistic, repetitive behavior begins. A strength on this theory is that there is helping evidence.

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For example , Wegner identified that a number of students asked not to think about a light bear had been more likely to do so than a group allowed to think about it. Salkoius found that when requesting participants to suppress thoughts and on different days not to, the individuals kept a diary of more distressing thoughts after they had to be under control these studies support the concept a strategic attempt to reduce thoughts leads to an increase in these kinds of thoughts; assisting the main ideas of the way. This is a strength because the two studies have found similar conclusions and are therefore externally trustworthy. This makes the cognitive procedure reliable overall because it could be checked and verified and the theory offers sound fundamentals for further study.

However , a weakness of this theory is the fact there are difficulties with the evidence. For example , Salkoius applied self-report methodologies in order to gauge the thoughts with the participants. Therefore the results may have been subjected to social desirability bias.

For example , the amount of distressing thoughts might not have all recently been recorded in the diaries in order to please the experimenter; they might not want these to know how awful their symptoms are because of feelings of embarrassment. This is an issue since it means the analysis lacks inner validity; the intrusive thoughts in the diary are not induced solely by simply supressing all of them, but you will find other extraneous variables such as embarrassment. All of us therefore cannot prove cause and effect to show that suppressing thoughts lead to symptoms in OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER, so there are other factors the cognitive approach needs to consider in order to give a causal explanation.

However , however are difficulties with self-report methodologies, they can offer a greater regarding the participant’s thoughts and a greater standard of detail. They are really allowing the participants to describe their own encounters rather than inferring this by observing participants. It therefore gives access to a high level of quantitative data.