Psychology Outline Essay

Examine the concepts of normality and abnormality.

In a world in which things are so categorized and organized, human beings are always asking themselves: ¿What is right? ¿What is wrong? ¿What is normal? ¿What is not? Psychology tries to give a definition of what is normal and what is consider abnormal, trying to answer the questions that are showed above but using empirical support in toanswer it. Normality is defined as something that is the majority, being with certain limits that define the range of normal functioning, being able to holds down a job and it is not threat to others or themselves; and abnormality is not being in the norm, not being able to hold down a job and it is a threat to others or themselves.
As it can be seen being normal is trying to be part of thesociety, try to fit in what is show or what has been learned with the pass of years. That perception about what it is being normal is one of the main reasons of the creation of an abnormality, but the problem is that for the society been abnormal also means that you are mentally ill. According to Szasz (1978) people suffers problems of living but they are not mentally ill, and in order to support hisidea he had three believes: the first was that abnormal behavior is so labeled because it is different but it is not to be mentally sick, the second one was that unusual belief systems are not necessarily wrong and the third is that the abnormal behavior is frequently a reflection of something wrong with society rather than with the individual. Focusing on the third belief it can also be clearlyseen the role of culture and society in the development of this concepts, and also the Austrian psychologist Marie Jahoda (1958) made a survey between psychologists in order to address what normal is, and by having that concept of what normal was, they could arrive to a definition of what abnormal is.
Concluding the idea, it can be establish that the term abnormality could not exist if the termnormality doesn’t exist either because society and other cultural norms are the ones that make possible the existence of something that is normal, and because of that existence of normality is that the different things in the society are considered to be abnormal as Szasz and Jahoda tried to prove in their studies.

Discuss the reliability and validity of diagnosis
A diagnosis is a way ortechnique in which psychologists or psychiatrists are able to identify the similar or different disorders and symptoms in someone that is mentally ill in order to arrive to explanations and methods to help the ones that are sick. Most of the techniques used in a diagnosis are observation, interviews, and brain scans. These techniques allow the psychologists to get to the identification of thedisorder; but also in order to get a successful identification of the disorder it is needed that the diagnosis is reliable and valid.
The reliability of a diagnosis is based on the diagnostications of the different times that a diagnosis is performed, so if the diagnostications are the same that will prove that the diagnosis is reliable. In a Beck’s Experiment (1962) it can be proved how reliabilityhas had a very low rate between the different diagnosis performed, in this study it was only achieved a 54 % of reliability because of the vague criteria of psychologists and also the way they gathered information ; this same result could be seen in an study conducted by Cooper et al in 1972 in which this researchers showed other psychologists and psychiatrists two video clips in order to diagnosewhich disorder appeared in the video, the result was that the psychologists from New York said that it was Schizophrenia and the psychologists in London said that was a mania or depression. Basing on this two studies it can be seen that in diagnosis the reliability is not very good and not accurate, but with the past of years and different improving the reliability starts going up. The validity...