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Making Sense of Behaviour
Published in Cathy Laver-Bradbury, Margaret J.J. Thompson, Christopher Gale, Christine M. Hooper, Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 2021
By understanding how mood (emotion), thought (cognition) and the lack of energy (behaviour) interact, cognitive psychologists developed a cognitive model of depression that allowed the development of cognitive-behavioural interventions to treat the disorder. They are as effective as antidepressants in the treatment of what psychiatrists think of as a biological condition, challenging the assumption that depression is primarily caused by a biological imbalance and suggesting that it may be a ‘thought imbalance’.
Research methods and design
Published in Jeremy Jolley, Introducing Research and Evidence-Based Practice for Nursing and Healthcare Professionals, 2020
To deduce something is to reach a conclusion about a question by drawing on one or more general principles. We may, for example, attempt to explain an adolescent’s behaviour by using Piagetian theory of human development (Piaget, 1952; Piaget and Inhelder, 1972). Researchers sometimes do the same thing with their research: they allow existing theory to guide the research (Regan and Howe, 2017). Deductive research is more commonly found in disciplines that have well-developed theories. If you were to ask a psychologist to explain their work, they might say that they were a Freudian psychologist, a cognitive psychologist or a behavioural psychologist. These terms represent major theoretical streams of thought (theories). It is not surprising, then, that a behavioural psychologist might want behaviourist theory to guide each stage of the research process. Researchers are explicit about the theory that has underpinned their research and sometimes write a section of their research report on the theoretical underpinning or the theoretical model that has been used.
Introduction
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
In the late 1950s, many British and American psychologists were heavily influenced by computer science, in an attempt to understand more complex behaviors which they felt had either been neglected altogether or greatly oversimplified by learning theory (conditioning). These complex behaviors were what Wundt, Watson, and other early scientific psychologists had called “mind or mental processes.” Instead, cognitive psychologists used the term “cognition or cognitive processes” to refer to the ways in which people come to know the world around them, how they attain, retain, and regain information, through the processes of perception, attention, memory, problem-solving, decision-making, language, and thinking in general. Cognitive psychologists see people as information processors, and human cognitive processes as similar to the operation of computer programs.
The use of robots for augmentative manipulation during play activities among children with motor impairment: a scoping review
Published in Disability and Rehabilitation, 2023
Sandra Martina Espín-Tello, Xabier Gardeazabal, Julio Abascal
The results found in this scoping review support the premise that the use of robots for augmentative manipulation during play activities among CwSMI may have a positive impact on the CwSMI’s cognitive skills and engagement in activities. These studies opened a way for researching the benefits of robot mediated play. Acknowledging the difficulties of carrying out formal evaluations in this environment, this study found that the quality of most of the reviewed studies was limited and in some cases poor, which may lead to a risk of bias in their results. To improve the quality of this area of study, further research using designs that provide a higher validity is needed, as well as cross-disciplinary work between robotics experts, developmental cognitive psychologists, occupational therapists and educators to develop better study designs and protocols.
The Need for “Big Bioethics” Research
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Joel E. Pacyna, Richard R. Sharp
However, there are a number of more subtle challenges raised by “big bioethics” research. As has been argued elsewhere (Scully 2019), empirical bioethics is a discrete discipline within the sciences that seeks to give patients—especially those at the margins of medicine—greater voice. As a discrete discipline, its aims and assumptions tend to attract scholars whose methodological preparation aligns with the types of research methods that have been used by bioethicists to empower those who may be silenced in healthcare. For example, bioethicists with advanced training in medical anthropology or ethnography will likely find a natural alignment between the traditional aims of bioethics research (e.g. understanding marginalized perspectives on healthcare) and the epistemic orientation provided by qualitative bioethics research. Correspondingly, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and cognitive psychologists might not be as quick to recognize potential connections between the aims of bioethics research and their areas of methodological expertise. Although bioethics researchers often partner with specialists in quantitative research, those experts are rarely members of bioethics programs. To the extent that bioethics programs support faculty and trainees whose research affinities and methodological skillsets align with the historical foci of the field—often scholars with expertise in qualitative research—many bioethics programs are not well positioned to conduct “big bioethics” research.
Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness
Published in Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 2021
Being educated as an experimental cognitive psychologist, I was taught that Noam Chomsky had effectively done away with behaviorism and its ban on psychological terms like memory, attention, and consciousness. It became acceptable (again) or even fashionable to speculate on all sorts of mental processes and to claim that experiments revealed the nature of these processes. Following Shiffrin and Schneider (1977) and Posner (1978), an avalanche of studies on attention appeared in scientific journals. However, not many dared to claim they had a good idea of what consciousness actually was. Shiffrin and Schneider used the term controlled behavior as the opposite of automatic or reflex-like behavior, but it was understood to refer to conscious behavior. When I start reading a book that attempts to explain what consciousness is, I have these problems of defining attention and conscious behavior in the back of my mind.