Schizophrenic Behavior

1. Outline a biological explanation of dysfunctional behaviour.

When researching dysfunctional behaviour, the people used have already been diagnosed with a disorder for example schizophrenia, this makes it difficult to identify cause and effect. The biological approach may explain schizophrenia in terms of genetic tendency, but work with patients that suffer from Parkinson’s disease showed a link between dopamine and schizophrenia. This shows that those who have schizophrenia have higher than normal levels of dopamine. But there is also the theory that suggests although schizophrenia is inherited the illness is actually brought on by stress.

The biological approach would favour the nature side of the Nature-nurture debate thus the focus on the individual not the situation in explaining dysfunctional behaviour. It believes that something in our biology is the fundamental cause of our behaviour, this could be a generic cause or a malformation of brain structures. For example, in the study of Gottesman and Shields the aim of the study was to review research into genetic transmission of schizophrenia, this was investigated through brain scans comparing the normal brain structure to that of a schizophrenic. A review of adoption studies and twin studies were used and the incidence of schizophrenia in adopted children and monozygotic twins was extrapolated from the research.

Interestingly all adoption studies found an increased incidence of schizophrenia in adopted children with a schizophrenic biological parent, this evidence reveals that the fundamental problem behind their dysfunctional behaviour stems from a generically passed down flaw supporting the biological theory. They also found that all twin studies found a higher concordance rate for schizophrenia in monozygotic than dizygotic twins.

1. To what Extent are explanations of dysfunctional behaviour reductionist?

Reductionism refers to levels of explanation which aim to understand the nature of what is complex by reducing it to that which is simpler or more fundamental.  The advantage of reductionism is that is allows us to retrieve the casual factors of human behaviours but a disadvantage is that it can overlook the dynamics between parts of a whole meaning that it ignores more complex explanations.

Gottesman and shields biological based study of dysfunctional behaviour could be said to be reductionist as it can overlook some aspects such as the influence of the social and physical environment. However, the study could be argued to be holistic as well as reductionist as being a review article it takes into account lots of research meaning an array of views however the study is predominantly reductionist as it only focus’s on biological factors and doesn’t consider other factors such as the age of the child when adopted, a variable which could certainly have an effect on the results.