Theories of Depression

Albert Bandura:

Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive learning theory suggested that people are shaped by the interactions between their behaviors, thoughts, and environmental events. Each piece in the puzzle can and does affect the shape of the other pieces. Human behavior ends up being largely a product of learning, which may occur vicariously (e.g., by way of observation), as well as through direct experience.

Bandura pointed out that depressed people's self-concepts are different from non-depressed people's self-concepts. Depressed people tend to hold themselves solely responsible for bad things in their lives and are full of self-recrimination and self-blame. In contrast, successes tend to get viewed as having been caused by external factors outside of the depressed person's control. In addition, depressed people tend to have low levels of self-efficacy (a person's belief that they are capable of influencing their situation). Because depressed people also have a flawed judgmental process, they tend to set their personal goals too high, and then fall short of reaching them. Repeated failure further reduces feelings of self-efficacy and leads to depression.

Juilian Rotter:

Rotter began work on his social learning theory of personality and in 1954 Social Learning and Clinical Psychology was published. In this book he laid out the basic tenets of his social learning theory, the main idea of which is that personality is really the interaction between a person and his or her environment. Personality does not reside within an individual independent of the environment he or she is in. By the same token, an individual's behaviors are not simple, reflexive responses to an objective environment. Rather, the environment an individual responds to or acts in is dependent on that particular individual's learning experiences and life history. What stimuli people respond to are shaped by their experiences. Two people might experience the same environment in very different ways. For example, Joe might respond to a visit to the doctor with apprehension because his last visit involved getting a painful shot, whereas Sam would not be apprehensive at all because his last visit was pleasant and did not involve any discomfort. To Rotter, personality is a relatively fixed group of dispositions to react to situations in a certain manner. He stressed that most learning takes place in social situations with other people. Rotter's personality theory was the first to comprehensively integrate cognition, in the form of expectancy, with learning and motivation, in the form of reinforcement. 

Martin Seligman: 

In early 1965, psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues" accidentally" discovered an unexpected phenomenon related to human depression while studying the relationship between fear and learning in dogs. Seligman's study involved watching what happened when a dog was allowed to escape an impending (and aversive but non-damaging) shock so long as they escaped from a designated area of their enclosure upon hearing a tone. During the first experiment, the researcher rang a bell immediately prior to administering a brief slightly unpleasant sensation to the dog. The idea was that the dog would learn to associate the tone with the shock. In the future, the dog would then feel fear when it heard the bell, and would run away or show some other fear-related behavior upon hearing the tone.

During the next part of the experiments, the researchers put the conditioned dog (which had just learned that hearing the tone is a warning for an upcoming shock) into a box with two compartments divided by a low fence. Even though the dog could easily see over and jump over the fence, when the researchers rang the bell and administered the shock, nothing happened (the dog was expected to jump over the fence.) Similarly, when they shocked the conditioned dog without the bell, nothing happened. In both situations, the dog simply lay down. Interestingly, when the researchers put a normal dog into the same box contraption, it immediately jumped over the fence to the other side.

Apparently, the conditioned dog had learned more than the connection between the tone and the shock. It has also learned that trying to escape from the shocks was futile.

Aaron Beck: 

Cognitive Behavior Theory

According to Beck, "If beliefs do not change, there is no improvement. If beliefs change, symptoms change. Beliefs function as little operational units," which means that one's thoughts and beliefs (schema) affect one’s behavior and subsequent actions. He believed that dysfunctional behavior is caused due to dysfunctional thinking, and that thinking is shaped by our beliefs. Our beliefs decide the course of our actions. Beck was convinced of positive results if patients could be persuaded to think constructively and forsake negative thinking. 

The Lobotomist

The Lobotomist - Walter Freeman
Walter Freeman was born on November 14, 1895. He was an American physician and he was a very popular person when he lived. He was born on a time when mental diseases such as Bipolar or Depression were not well studied diseases. The people that were mentally ill would be taken into a warehouse or prison were they would do nothing just lay down and stay there until they died. They were treated very poorly in these places and to be mentally ill was really an uglier thing than how it is today. Walter Freeman was a physician and he could not stand the idea of people having to get inside that place because they were mentally ill so he decided to perform a Lobotomy. The idea of a lobotomy was already thought by a portuguese physician but Dr Walter Freeman perfectioned it. Freeman was looking to solve mental problems fast and the lobotomy was a very quick process and at the beginning it was a very good surgery but then he was denounced as a medical monster! There was no succesful lobotomy because there would start to be flaws after three or four months. It was called the Trans Orbital Lobotomy and the process was very easy.First they would but the person unconscious by electrocuting the him and then they would insert an ice pick through the eye lobe and tap it with a hammer to take aaway the part of your brain that connects to the frontal lobe and the part of your brain that handles emotions.

Allice Hamock was the first American person to receive a lobotomy and at first there were only good signs coming of her.. It worked for four months at first but then it had a relapse were the person would go crazy again. It would work because he symptoms would first go away but the disease it self did not go away.

Rosemary Kennedy became seriously disabled after her lobotomy. Things started going wrong when he was trying to take a picture while doing the operation and the ice pick slipped and killed the patient. Doctor Freeman didnt have any choice but to leave the hospital and he did. Freeman started going crazy like getting addicted to doing lobotomy and you know what they say: everything in excess is bad. Freeman started to get a bad reputation because some pills started to make him competition so he stopped doing Lobotomys. Four years after he retired, he decided to look for a lot of his former patients to prove everybody that lobotomies were not a medical failure.

Bipolar Video Response

After watching the video of the child named Evan Scott Perry, i have learned a lot from the mental dissorder known as Bipolar. Bipolar is a sickness that makes most of the people that suffer from it, to kill themselves. Bipolar consists of sudden mood swings for example in the documentary of Evan. The documentary shows how Evan when he was a small child he was very funny and a enthusiastic child but then when he started to grow he started to ask things about what would happen if he killed himself. Sometimes he just told his parents or teacher that he was going to jumpo off a window. The kid passed through many phases in his life for example he went to some kind of rehab center and they gave him a special medicine that tranquilized him a little. Also, he tried to commit suicide before getting in this rehab mentioned before. This is one of the hardest and most hurtful illnesses because for example you can be looking at the funniest and most kind person in the world but in 5 minutes he will be a complete demon and a very different person and that is really hard for his family and friends and it can lead to horrible endings. Most of the people who are diagnosed with Bipolar end up killing themselves. 

Are All Memories Alike? - Cultural Differences

I found this article to be very interesting because I had never really thought on the topic of cultural differences in memory. I read the article and in my opinion, it is a very interesting fact to know that there are differences in memory within cultures like for example they say in the article that maybe a North Korean old guy could never remember something before age 4, but maybe a "gringo" might remember anything from 4 years and below because of what Freud called "childhood-amnesia". I learned a lot in this article because sometimes you are able to know something without really thinking about it and this is what happened to me when I was reading the article. there were some parts that I felt like i was hearing the same story I had heard from someone else before but never really sat down and thought about it really.

Are all Memories Alike? - Gender Differences

Based on the article, I learned that in fact gender differences favour women because it says that some scientists researched this and found out that women are better than men to remember everyday events. Specific results indicated that women excelled in verbal episodic memory tasks, such as remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events, and men outperformed women in remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information, known as visuospatial processing. For example the results ay thata a man would be more fast to find his way out in the woods. 
Also, the results say that women would remember better such things as locations of car keys or something like that. Also, using the information given we can see that women are better to remember things like faces or names and especially those of females. 
To determine this particular finding, the psychologists presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The findings indicate that women were able to remember the androgynous faces presented as female more accurately than the androgynous faces presented as male.

The Placebo Effect - is it real or just imagined?

In my opinion, the Placebo Effect is a special occasion when you are given a "Placebo" pill which means that the pill is fake. The pill can simply be sugar or anything else that wont make your pain go away, but once you take the pill, your brain starts to think that you are going to feel better because you already drank a pill for it. That is how the placebo effect works. In the class we have learned many different cases in which Placebo pills have worked for a lot of people that have a really messed up situation. For example, there can be fake operations in which the whole procedure of sleeping the person and cutting you open is done, and all of a sudden the person starts feeling better because he thinks that he had the surgery already.

Henry Beecher is a famous psychologist that made a paper called the Powerful Placebo and it was really an impact. While this paper did not introduce the idea of placebo reactions, its importance was that it stressed—for the first time—the necessity of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. In his 1955 paper, Beecher only speaks of placebo effects on specific occasions when he is contrasting them with drug effects.


These studies have problems like for example, the people that are being tested might think that they are being fooled when they are told that they were taking placebo pills. 
In my opinion, I think that Placebo pills have been a great discovery because maybe with these pills some doctors can cure incredible cure-free diseases and it is a great invention!

Alzheimer´s Disease

I have read the first article on alzheimer and it has really shocked me that more than 5 million Americans currently suffer from alzheimer´s disease and it will keep on growing and it will never stop just like AIDS.
It is funny how each and every second that passes there are more and more people dying because of smoking problems or more people are being born with each second that passes.

 But also, every second that passes there is a new person that is diagnosed with Alzheimers disease and the ugly part about this is that we can not do anything to prevent having it or to cure the sickness.

In my personal opinion, Alzheimer´s is one of the most cruel and devastating deaths because it makes you suffer a lot and its not only the diagnosed person that suffers: it is also the person´s family that suffers because of it´s symptoms. If a cure is not found fast for this sickness, it will become a really menace to the world just like yellow fever and small pox sometime killed many people. To beat this sickness, first we have to recruit volunteers to join a study that can help identify who is at greatest risk of developing the condition. The results could paint a clearer picture of the factors that put people in danger. People have searched for the answer but have failed to find it.

Alzheimer´s most casually strikes on old people and more women than men.