Gender Bias In Diagnosis Of Depression

Following a discussion Steve Hosier had in a lecture a few days ago about depression and how women are more likely to be diagnosed with depression, it got me thinking about coping mechanisms each gender has and how that could affect amounts of diagnosis.

It is true that diagnosis in women may be more prevalent because they are more likely to seek help when the physical signs start showing, and that males avoid the intimacy of talking about their feelings and so do not look for help but suffer the same amount of depression, so it got me thinking about the differences men and women face in coping with the disorder as well as how the problem manifests...

(Yeahh writing this Ive just realised it is more informative than topical, but hey its pretty interesting)

According to upliftprogram.com Males are more likely to blame others, self medicate with drug use, lose sleep and are often angry. Women seemingly blame themselves, feel sad, anxious, withdraw, and self medicate through food...

http://www.upliftprogram.com/facts_depression_men.html

I find it interesting to think of how much stigma is still attached to this illness and how the stigma is reinforced and made more apparent because of your gender despite it being a fairly common disorder!

Any thoughts on the subject, psychology crew?

What I think about Quasi experiments...

A Quasi experiment is an experimental method that uses lab type controls but makes use of ready existing Independat Variables.

Quasi methods are incredibly useful in the fact that they can aviod ethical concerns, say if the variable that you wanted to measure could otherwise harm the participants.

Examples include smoking, drinking or any habit forming activity as well as other things such as someoe who has had a stroke or an operation that could otherwise alter there normal being.

An example of the Quasi method could be the functions of the left and right hemisphere of the brains when the corpus callossum (not sure if thats the proper spelling) is severed. This connective tissue is only cut when the person who has had the operation has suffered severe seizures to prevent it passig from one hemisphere to the other...

Sperry (yeah A level study here) tried to understand 'lateralisation of function' in the brain by using these split brain patients. He used methods that included showing to images, one either side of the screen on a moniter, that appeared for one tenth of a second to see what parts of the brain couldcomprehend language etc. as well as a tactile task were each side of the brain was, in essence told to find a certain object. Funnily with the tactile task the hands seemed to operate completely individual from one another.. If one hand came across the object the other hand searched for it ignored the fact entirely!

Yeah I could go on about that because it is a really interesting study but it is just my evidence!

The point is Quasi experiments are useful because like ive said you couldnt walk up to someone on the street and cut their brain in half for your research purposes.

What do you think is the most useful study method?

Maybe Ethics :D

     Hey Mutha Blogga's, now I genuinly dont know what to write about but I'm going to give it a shot.

     Ethics in research are probably one of the largest factors to consider when thinking about designing a study. Its no good saying 'I'm going to study the effects of getting hit by a car on emotion' and asking for volunteers. Just no one will apply, unless theyre a little crazy anyway... The ammount of ethical considerations are now so important that they do govern what can and cant be done! I'll reduce the topic a little now though and discuss the 'debrief'.

     To me, debriefing your participats is one of the biggies in the ethical consideration world. If you coduct an experiment and dont give them the full picture at the end there could be a lot of wonder, confusion or even stress as to what they just took part in, especially if the experiment requires you to go the extra mile in terms of performing certain tasks. (Milgrams study into authorities effect on obedience) http://www.wadsworth.com/psychology_d/templates/student_resources/0155060678_rathus/ps/ps01.html

     If the participants in Milgrams study were left to believe they had seriously injured or possibly killed another person who knows what damage could have been caused to their mental state. What do you think is the most important ethical consideration in psychology?
(Yeahh thats right I just a question to generate debate)

peace out

Reliabilty of Case Studies

Okay, hey guys, Im going to attempt to talk about the reliability of case studies so bare with me if I completely miss the idea. The thing about case studies is they generally focus on an individual or specific group of people for a long period of time, (or at least A level has shown me that) so we could easily question the reliability of most case studies as chances are because its an individual you study the findings you gain are also tailored to that individual. For example, going back to A level, Thigpen and Cleckley conducted therapy on a woman who looked for help for her blinding headaches and blackouts. After several suspect actions such as a letter that appeared to be written by two different people and an episode where 'Eve White' held her head in pain and returned upright with a completely different persona therapists concluded she had multiple personality disorder. Whilst Thigpen and Cleckley collected over 100 hours of information on the personalities some say people got too close to their patient. Other questionable data taken from this case study was the fact that they assigned a lead personality to take over completely but thats a different topic... We can question the reliability of this case study because as mentioned before only Eve White suffered from this particular MPD. We cant assume that everyone will go through exactly the same as what she went through. It could even be and should be said that some of the qualitative data collected by T and C was easily subjective. And that is the problem with case studies of this nature. We cant generalise findings and so clouding the reliability of the data gathered. That should make sense and yeah look forward to any comments :D

How we study psychology

Hey hey hey, now there are a fair few ways in which we study psychology but I'm going to talk about experiments. Lab experiments are experiments where the researcher controls all variables. This ensures only the independant variable is what is being measured. all extraneous or confounding variables are removed from the equation. An example illustrating laboratory experiment conditions is the experiment conducted by Simon Baron- Cohen. His experimet looked into people with higher functioning autism to test for 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). This is the ability to look at something from another persons point of view or for lack of a better word empathise. Using what he found was a purely ToM task, the eyes task, Baron Cohen compared scores between the autistic group, a group of people with tourettes syndrome and a group who, and i know this isnt fair to say but, could be considered normal... It was found that the autistic group struggled the most when attempting to decipher the emotion behind each set of eyes. the scores came somewhere along the lines of 20.4 for the 'normal' group and roughly 16 for the autistic group. The tourettes group too scored into the 20s. their role in this experiment was to act as a control to see if ToM was absent in other people with disorders but it was not the case. Here we can see that the use of controls and non bias tests makes the lab experiment a useful way to gather information.