The Causes Of Eating Disorders Psychology Essay

The Causes Of Eating Disorders Psychology Essay An eating disorder is a psychological illness where the subject has an abnormal relationship with food, and has a distorted view himself or herself. Particularly in those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia, there is an obsession with weight loss and food intake. They are also unable to see how self-destructive their behaviour is, and view themselves as too fat even when underweight. (Tighe, 2011)This essay will examine the causes of eating disorders and the psychological explanations that go along with them. Three psychological models will be looked at the cognitive approach, the behavioural approach and finally, the psychodynamic approach. The basis of the Cognitive approach is the theory that the human brain works like a computer. Processed outside information becomes our thoughts and our output is our behaviour. Cognitive psychologists would explain that the causes of eating disorders are due to faulty cognition (thoughts) and having distorted perceptions of self. A. Beck was the pioneer of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which can help eating disorder sufferers challenge their faulty thinking and change their perceptions. (DK, 2011)It is easy to see then, how CBT could be very useful in treating those with an eating disorder, as many symptoms of eating disorders are to do with faulty perception of the self. Fallon and Rozin (1985) also did research based on the cognitive model. They gave a chart of nine images of body types to both men and women. On the chart the silhouettes were either very slim to those of a higher weight. On the chart they placed how they perceived their own weight, how they perceived what weight was attractive to those of the opposite sex and their own, ideal weight. Women tended to place both their ideal weight and the weight they thought men would be attracted to on the lower side of the scale. Their perceived current weight placed at a significantly higher point on the scale. The men however, placed both their ideal weight and current weight close together but the weight that they perceived women to find attractive was higher on the chart*. This research is useful at seeing the difference between how male and female perception of self and ideal weight differs. However, there are some problems with it. For example, all the people asked were American and between the ages of 18-19 and all went to a private college, which suggests that they were, upper to middle class. This means that this piece of research is highly ethno- centric; it is not applicable to those who are exempt from that background and culture. The research in itself also lacks a certain amount of objective, as even though it shows peoples perceptions of their body it does not mean they are all suffering or will suffer from an eating disorder. The research also now lacks historical validity as it was carried out in 1985. Ideal body image was different to how it is now. (Adler, 1992) The cognitive approach can have positive appraisal as it backed up scientifically. Its face validity reflects in the success rate for CBT, which is often very high. The downside is that is seems to de-humanise people. It does not place any bearings on the patients emotions or their individual circumstances. A patient also seems to face large amount of blame and responsibility. In contrast with the Cognitive, approach is the psychodynamic approach; Sigmund Freud was the main trailblazer and the first person to study the mind. He believed that Mental Illness and mal -adaptive behaviour was due to repressed memories and emotions held in our unconscious mind and that, causes of emotional pain can be bought out through psychoanalysis (DK, 2011). This quote also links into another part of what Freuds theory was on how the human mind worked. He believed that the human psyche had three main parts: the id, ego and the superego. Freud believed the id is responsible, for our basic animal instincts, such as wanting food, or sex. There was also the ego was the part of the mind that was connected with the reality of the situation you are in. Finally, the superego is the moral part of the psyche. It is the voice that tells us was is good and right to do regardless of what the id wants. Freuds belief is that if the id, ego and superego are unbalanced then it is one of the pre- cursors to mental illness, such as an eating disorder. Freud also put a strong emphasis on early childhood experiences. He concluded that poor parenting or difficulty bonding with parents as a child could lead to mental illness and abnormal behaviour as an adult. A psychodynamic view of the cause of someone having an eating disorder if a younger women for example, would be that in her unconscious mind she fears becoming an adult. Due to this fear, she tries to revert to being a child by losing weight, causing her to lose her feminine figure and to stop herself menstruating. H. Bruch also believed that this aspiration of wanting to become a child might also be to do with having a poor relationship with parents who did not help her to develop any sort of identity. * There are some definite criticisms about the psychodynamic approach. One of the biggest problems with it is its very difficult to test as it is based on case studies, not scientific testing. In fact, the only way you could test it is by using identical twins by putting one through a trauma and the other one not; this of course, is greatly unethical. You also cannot duplicate the exact result on any other patient. What more, the approach has a huge bias against parenting and the role it could play in mental illness. However, numerous case studies back up the psychodynamic approach and the use of psychoanalysis; so it could work for some people. The last and final approach analysed is the Behavioural approach. The theory of it is that all behaviours learned are due to experience. In addition, those behaviours can then be unlearned. Ivan Pavlov, research the theory of classical conditioning by using dogs. He used a stimulus such as a bell ringing and giving the dog food at the same time to condition the dog to expect food whenever it heard the bell ring. The dog would even start to salivate before it saw the food but still heard the ringing of the bell. (Youtube, 2008) B.F Skinner expanded on Pavlovs research and called his theory Radical Behaviourism. He started by using mice. He would place the mice in a box; whenever the mouse pressed a lever or bar, it food was given. Skinner explained that this wasnt operant conditioning like Pavlovs as there was no preceding stimulus; the behaviour of the mouse was continued by the positive reinforcement of getting food. He continued his research by then wiring up the floor of the box t o an electric source. The mouse would then get a shock when performing certain behaviour. The mouse then learned the behaviour and shock were linked .This is negative reinforcement. (DK, 2011) The behavioural approaches explanation of the causes of an eating disorder in an individual would be due to either positive or negative reinforcement. An example of operant conditioning, that led to someone developing an eating disorder would be, that if a teenage girl kept losing weight and got continuous praise from friends, but then also receiving negative criticism from her parents for saying she was greedy whenever she ate. She would learn that if she lost weight and did not eat much her friends would complement her and her parents in turn, would accept her. Criticisms of the behavioural approach are that scientific testing is possible. It also gives quick results when it comes to treatment. Unfortunately, it does not focus on the patients emotions or their current personal circumstances. Neither, is it suitable to treat all illnesses, with eating disorders in particular a downside of it would be, that it changes the behaviour but has not influence of the cause, of that behaviour. In conclusion, it is widely acknowledged that eating disorders do not have one overruling cause but have a complex mixture of disordered thinking and negative perceptions of self. Poor interpersonal relationships and past trauma may also play a part. Eating disorders may also run in social groups and behaviours associated with eating disorders may be picked up/learned through peer pressure. (National Eating Disorders Association, 2004)It is safe to say then that all of the psychological approaches: cognitive, behavioural and psychodynamic are all perfectly valid in explaining why someone may suffer from an eating disorder and it is wise to keep an open minded approach to treating an eating disorder, as all of the approaches work in a highly interwoven and harmonious way. *Allen. C (2012) Lecture notes: Studies on eating disorders. [Access to HE, 24th October] References: Adler, L. D. (1992). Female and Male Perceptions of I deal Body Shapes. Retrieved October Wednesday 24th, 2012, from Lillianmcmaster.com: http://www.lillianmcmaster.com/resources/ideal%20body%20image%20study%20on%20caucasians.pdf DK. (2011). The Psycholgy Book. London: Dorling Kindersley. National Eating Disorders Association. (2004). What Causes Eating Disorders. Retrieved October Thursday 25th, 2012, from National Eating Disorders.org: http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/nedaDir/files/documents/handouts/WhatCaus.pdf Tighe, J. (2011, May). Eating Disorders. Retrieved October Wednesday 24th, 2012, from BBC Health: http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/emotional_health/mental_health/mind_eatingdisorders.shtml Youtube (Director). (2008). Classical Conditioning- Ivan Pavlov [Motion Picture].

Disjunction of Senses in Modern City Life

Disjunction of Senses in Modern City life In his chapter â€Å"City Life and the Senses,† John Urry discusses how the senses system operates in â€Å"open societies† of streams of crowds in open space. The five senses are comprised by the visual, auditory, touch, taste, and olfactory. Urry views visuality as an ambivalent force that is prioritized above the other sense through the developments of centuries and somewhat abused by as visual sense becomes increasingly accelerated in the city life dominated by technology.The imbalance in the sensed environment is magnified by the physical natures of the senses themselves, but the inexpedience in this discrepancy is a product of civilization, implying that visuality and other senses are capable of interacting collaboratively under a hierarchy for a city life that â€Å"plays to all the senses. † The innate features of eyes provide the power for the visual sense. Light travels almost instantaneously while other mediums , like voice, are air-borne. Signals emitted by the sender are instantaneously received by the viewer.While sound and scent can collect their input from all directions and frequencies, sight is focused and specified. Urry mentions Simmel’s argument that â€Å"the eye is a unique ‘sociological achievement’† which â€Å"produces extraordinary moments of intimacy. † Uninterrupted interactions between the eyes carry â€Å"the history of their life and †¦the times dowry of nature. † These characteristics allows â€Å"the eye to [objectify] and [master]† more than the other senses. One could choose to close his eyes when the objects do not reach the expectation.Thus, vision possesses a seemingly superior ability to judge objects from specified angels. Another nature of the eye is that it can act as a delicate measuring tool that collects a vast amount of information. As Urry shows, the eye â€Å"sets a distance, and maintains a distanc e. † Consequently, this capacity to carry and discharge information â€Å"enables the world to be controlled at a distance, combining detachment and mastery† and communication between individuals â€Å"produces the ‘most complete reciprocity’ of person to person, face to face. In addition, Technology adds a new dimension to the existing complexity of visual dominance in the spatiality of sense. The implementation of modern technologies further enlarges the prioritizing of vision. Urry writes that â€Å"vision was given an especially powerful role in the modern era. † Cell phones, emails, and video chatting messengers, like Skype connect people wirelessly. Touch and smell no longer factor into the interactions such that it is no longer necessary for the physical presence of a person for communication.People seek increasingly greater standards for technologies that appeal to the visual sense. Modern innovations, for example, have advanced television f rom black-and-white to color to LED display to plasmid and recently to HDTV for ever improved visual experience. In contrast, there have been few advances in the auditory capabilities of modern inventions. The radio remains mostly unchanged through the past half century. The contrast between technological advances caters again to an assumed superiority of vision over the other sense. However, visuality has its limitations.We have abused the bestowed privilege while the human activities in modern society favor the development of visual sense. â€Å"According to Urry, â€Å"the city both is fascinated with, and hugely denigrates, the visual. † The moment the look dominates, the boy loses its materiality. † The mind becomes biased and receives false information about the truth as our eyes are more involved in working and recreational activities. For example, when shopping for luxury commodity, without â€Å"touching,† people sometimes believe in their visual judgme nt of the authenticity of the product.Besides, the eye turns vulnerable due to excessive usage. More and more people are optically corrected with glasses and contacts. Hand-free products grow multiplicatively popular thanks to its ability to dilution the burden of visual sense. Meanwhile, other senses are essential in that their importance is exemplified by the vast number of common expressions in daily speech. â€Å"Each sense gives rise to metaphors which attest to the relative importance of each within everyday life. People use expressions like â€Å"sounds good to me† and â€Å"it rings a bell,† attesting to the importance of the auditory realm. The auditory sense plays an important role in our learning process. From infancy, we are exposed mostly to sound while we are still â€Å"blind† about what is happening in the world. Then, we start to learn to talk by listening to our parents and are able to identify objects by connecting things we see with their au ditory equivalents. In school, lecturing is an indispensible portion of learning.Most students prefer learning from their instructors over reading the books and trying to understand the material. Furthermore, there are activities involving other senses that are insubstitutional by visuality. Music is a discipline in which visual sense is ineffective. Determining a keynote of melody, for some people, is an even more proficient mastery than visuality. Indeed, each division of the sensed system attempts to adapt to the evolving spatiality as the open societies become gradually civilized.Urry suggests that no matter which coordinates we use, â€Å"a threshold of effect of a particular sense which has to be met before another sense is operative. † This is not quite true. Multiple senses are certainly capable of coexisting in a parallel manner, and they should cooperate under a hierarchy between different senses. The concept â€Å"sensuous geography,† which connects together analyses of body, sense, and space,† should be introduced when examining the issue. The significance of the open societies is to encourage communication and mixture between senses and to achieve spatial complementarities.For instance, â€Å"sight is not seen as the noblest of the senses but as the most superficial, as getting in the way of real experiences that should involve other sense and necessitate much longer periods of time in order to be immerses in the site. † People have come up with approaches such that we can integrate the senses together to be truly reciprocal not within itself, but rather among the divisions to illustrate a decent understanding of city life that is composed. When someone visits a landscape, he or she can carry an electronic mobile auditory guide with them which plays an audio introduction of the spot.The device not only facilitates and enhances visual experience, but also alters the perception of the surrounding space for the tourist beca use â€Å"each sense contributes to people’s orientation in space. † Failure to do so may lead them to be insensitive and incapacitated. It is inevitable that the senses system has developed unequally as the open societies refine. Although visuality plays an essential role in city life, we ought not to overlook the rest of senses, such as previously discussed auditory sense. On the other hand, it is imperative to have a hierarchy for the five senses to operate cooperatively.Nevertheless, senses system may still remain stagnant in suburban cities, or closed societies, where people are not congested by technologies and crowds. Despite of their disparate spatiality and sensed environment, we shall consider the alternative account of sensing nature to assist our understanding of city life in open societies.Bibliography â€Å"City Life and the Senses. † Urry, John. A compaion to the city. Blackwell Publishing, 200. 388-397. Wikipeadia. 27 9 2008 <http://en. wikipe dia. org/wiki/Auditory_learning>.

Marries Is Better Than Being Single

ed is MARRIED IS BETTER THAN BEING SINGLE There are lots of discussion and arguments about to being single or getting married nowadays. The new generation might not willing to bound into marriage life and they wish to remain in single life so they can have more privacy, freedom and the commitment of   responsibilities. However, marriage is union ordained by God and it is also a wonderful union of two people in love. It is unique, opposite-sex union with legal, social, economic and spiritual dimensions. Getting married does bring a lot of advantages to a person either family.The biggest advantage for getting married is emotional stability. Married people treat their own family as shelter and they can feel secure and relax when staying together with their family. Family provides a peace and comfort zone for those married people to restore their energy. Marriage can helps the couple to become more tolerant, unselfish, caring and more responsible. Its provide a chances for the husband and wife to grow with and sharing their life’s challenges, rewards and sorrows with a person who actually knows and understand what you going through and feels the same frequency.There are a lots of difficulties have to learn by marriage people as that is not easiest to living with someone for the rest of their life. They have to overcome all the problems facing by them and to learn how to take care of others feeling, patience, emotion control, temper, time management and attitude towards their family. In a marriage life, there are always someone’s to hear your companions. It is good to have someone there to have a share, to bounce ideas or to have a witty exchange of remarks.Companionship among the married peoples also offers support and can be particularly important at times of trouble or stress. At such times, married people have distinct advantages over being single. The other advantage for marriage is that allows couples to pool their both incomes to share the cos t of living and debts, save more money for retirement and doing investment. The married people can also sharing a house, car and food so they can enjoy save cost for basic living conditions compare with a single person.Therefore, people who are married become less poverty but more wealth and their money goes further. It is because, they tend to specialize, exchange, and share roles and functions in ways to generate higher earnings, encourage savings, helping each other’s to restrain from impulse spending, and generally leave the family financially better off. Marriage can also leads to better health and greater longevity for people. There are more likely to enjoy better physical health. The spouses are intimately aware of and impacted by their spouse’s choices.In a sense, couples have a significant vested interest in watching out for one another and encouraging healthy choices and behaviour. For example, the wife might not allow her husband drinking, smoking or other u nnecessary risk-taking and also control his weights. Compared to single, divorced or widowed people, the married people experience less depression, anxiety, and other types of psychological distress. Besides, the married people will have active, satisfying and safety sex lives compared with single people. The married people tend to have more sex because it costs them less in time, money and psychic energy.They have find it more satisfying because their sex partner is more available, less distracted, more eager and more secure and able to please. The higher levels of satisfaction for married couples is related to the fact that marriage adds meaning to the sexual act because it symbolizes a union that is based on sexual fidelity, stronger commitment and emotional intimacy. It had increased their commitment and their sense of responsibility, and had generally strengthened their relationships. In addition, the married life can brings greater safety towards the married people and expand their social network.It’s because, the married people have companion to visit places together, visit friends or holiday together. For the single person, that is far more difficult as often modern social life is geared around ‘couples' and the single person can often feel left out or sometimes, simply not invited. At times, perhaps, having children might seem to impede their social life but it just brings a change in your social life and much of that social life involves being with your children. Lastly, married people will create a family with a new and challenging life instead of boring life compared with single people.Families are created and held together by the lifelong commitment of a man and a woman who live cooperatively and raise and nurture the children born to them. Families are the building block essential to the formation of a community, and strong social structure arises from the foundation many families provide. A thriving society and culture depend on sta ble marriages. For example, as marriage declines in a culture,  the state must spend more money and care for children who less of the financial stability with divorce family background.Strong marriages statuses are at the heart of thriving family and community. In conclusion, getting married is better than being single as there married leads to emotional stability, financial stability, train the couples become more independent and responsible, better health and greater longevity, have wonderful sexual life, easy to expand social networks and have a new challenging life instead of boring life compared to single people. Getting married is not an easy but it does bring a lot of meaningful to individuals, family and the community.

Eugenics And The History Of Medical Ethics - 1490 Words

â€Å"It is impossible to understand the history of eugenics and its enduring legacies in California outside the framework of Chicana/o history†. Sterilization practices in Puerto Rico and California, pre- and post- legal eugenics can be examined through the context of eugenics and the history of medical ethics. â€Å"Although steady or increasing rates of sterilization in some cases reflected women’s demands for birth control, the lines between voluntary and coerced were often quite blurred† and a case can be made that negative eugenics were being implemented on a societal level in both countries.1 It is impossible to talk about eugenics in the United States and Puerto Rico without some context of the history. With the troubled history of†¦show more content†¦Years and much unethical conduct in the United States later the Belmont Report established ethical guidelines for treating patients in 1979. The main three principals are respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. These categories include things like informed consent, weighing risk to benefit, and fairness. It also established rules behind informed consent such as all information must be available and comprehensible to the patient and coercion never being acceptable. This and Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, which came out in the same year, marked a major turning point in the laws regarding ethical medical practices in the United States. However, the underlying principle of medical ethics had been around since 1780 or so when Hippocrates directed physicians â€Å"to help and do no harm†. Puerto Rican birth control regulation gained official support in 1937 when the reason for the sterilizations moved to being about health reasons instead of economic reasons. However, poor health is often caused by poverty so these are really one and the same. This movement was also an attempt by the government to keep the â€Å"surplus population† low. Post-partum sterilization was encouraged but birth control clinics also became increasingly common. Studies were conducted that showed a â€Å"demand† for permanent sterilization after which the US government openly supported Puerto Rico’s efforts. However much of this