Lecture 1

Kees Keizer and Nina Hansen are this year's lecturer and they describe the course Social Environment and Behavior as an opportunity for the students to learn how social theories are applied to real-life problems. In contrast to most of the other familiar professors their work is focused outside the university and they are usually hired by parties outside to the science domain. For example, Kees has worked on projects with hospitals to stop the smoking in adjacent areas. Whereas, Nina is interested in cultural change and how it is affected by modernization, transforming economies, etc. Her work includes evaluating the introduction of different aids that are successful in the western countries, but its effects are not as clear in the context of developing countries. For instance, micro financing might help people escape poverty, but can also have negative impact on one's family life.

The goals of the course are helping students learn analyzing and explaining how various human factors relate to social problems as well as how the social and physical surrounding affect human behavior and perception. Furthermore, after the course student should be able to apply theories with the aim of evaluating societal problems. Last but not least, gaining insight into how people can be influenced in order to engage in a number of adaptive behaviors, as well as assessing the usefulness of interventions is a crucial step to solving the problem in hand.

We see it is all about addressing some societal issues, but what can these actually be? Reducing the levels of energy use, preventing accidents on the road and convincing people to stop smoking are very well-known examples. In the domain of work, we want to know how to make people more motivated and in turn more productive. Media and its influences have gained lots of attention, as people are overloaded with information. Furthermore, immigration and how people integrate is highly relevant nowadays, because our environment is getting more culturally diverse. Another maybe less well-intentioned example is developing marketing strategies for companies.

However, all of these social psychological problems are interrelated with various economic, political, geographical or historical factors. For instance, there have been numerous earthquakes in the region of Groningen due to the intensive extraction of natural gas. Here economical factor such as the Netherlands' huge profit would be crucial to consider when taking action, because just ceasing the process would lead to inevitable financial issues. Moreover, political factors should be acknowledged as many governmental institutions are involved in such issue. Overall, it is not only people's attitudes and emotions we have to recognize, but take a broader perspective.

Even though we need to be careful about different factors, social aspects are the.....read more

Lecture 1

Establishment of Clinical Psychology

The roots for clinical psychology go back to the Second World War when many soldiers returned traumatised after fighting in the war. The clinicians to that time have not had a clear treatment guidelines, but did what “felt right”. The need of finding ways to treat those people finally led to the establishment of the Journal of Clinical Psychology in 1945. Shortly afterwards, application of the scientist-practitioner started, so that empirical findings were used in clinical practice. Carl Roger stressed the importance of finding ways in which treatment can become more effective. According to Roger, therapies should be studied more in detail in order to become more knowledgeable about how it can be improved.

Clinical Psychology

Clinical psychology (psychopathology) has two different components. It includes the symptoms of the psychological disorders on the one hand, and the scientific study of those symptoms on the other hand. Abnormal psychology is used as a synonym for clinical psychology. When using the term “abnormal”, it is important to define when behaviour is normal versus abnormal. Several factors are taken into account in defining abnormal behaviour. Firstly, “abnormal” involves the deviation from a statistical norm, implying that abnormal behaviour is unusual and can be quantified. However, this criterion can be problematic since comparing normal versus abnormal behaviour usually involves subjective judgment. Furthermore, not all behaviour that deviates from the norm is considered negative: if a great pianist plays the piano every time he is able to do so, for example, this behaviour is not considered to fall into the category of “abnormal psychology”.

Another aspect when considering abnormality is the cultural context of that behaviour. There are no universal standards in the diagnosis of abnormal behaviour. One behaviour might be considered normal in one culture, but abnormal in another one. As a result, people may not receive treatment for specific disorders in some countries. An example which shows the importance of the cultural background is the pseudo-scientific disorder drapetomania: in the past, slaves who ran away from their employers were considered to have this “mental illness”.

Furthermore, abnormality also depends on the individual’s functioning in society. Abnormal behaviour may represent itself by disfunction in daily living. However, not all dysfunctional behaviours are caused by psychopathology: the fact that people spend more time sleeping in winter than in summer can for example better be explained by evolution.

A further criterion of “abnormal” behaviour is that it is distressing or disabling the person. This definition is independent of culture. However, it requires the person to be aware of the negative consequences of the.....read more