Question

2. Jessica is a 24-year-old woman who is suffering from depression. Her boyfriend of 2 years recently committed suicide, and she has been trying to figure out why.

What is the difference between dispositional and situational factors?

Jessica overhears someone say that Jessica has been a “psycho” ever since her boyfriend killed himself. Discuss the implications of labeling and social perception.

Discuss Rosenhan’s study and how it relates to labeling.

Answer 1

1. The difference between dispositional and situational factors is :-

# Situational Factors

External factors

-depends on situation/setting they are in or role they have

# Dispositional Factors

internal factors

-factors including personality, characteristics, mood, beliefs

2. The implications of labeling and social perception is that it makes the subject deviant. Deviance inside formal deviance like murder , assault etc and violation of social norms ( informal deviance )

3. Rosenhans study :-

- Aim

Looking at validity of diagnosis of mental health disorders using DSM.

To see if they can distinguish between sane and insane.

Wanted to see if mental health disorders lie with the individual or with observer making the diagnosis.

- Procedure

8 pseudo patient from different backgrounds form housewife to psychiatrist.

Pps has fake names and jobs to prevent suspicion.

12 different hospitals located in 5 different states, private, under staff or over staffed.

Pps made appointments themselves, saying they heard unfamiliar voices that were unclear but said 'empty', 'hollow' and 'thud'.

All other questions are answered honestly and when they were asked if they were hearing voices again, they said no.

Pps made records of observation at first privately at first but then did it public as staff didn't pay attention to patients activities.

Rosenhan then sent real patients to the hospital and asked them to rate whether they would be identifies as healthy imposters on a scale of 1-10, the lower the score, the higher their confidence that the patient was fake.

The hospital thought all patients are fake when they were actually all real patients.

- Findings

All were admitted to hospital, 7 diagnoses with schizophrenia and 1 with bipolar disorder.

When released, they were said to have 'schizophrenia in remission' so they were still insane.

Length of hospitalisation was between 7 to 52 days, average being 19 days.

In 3 cases, 35 of 118 patients of wards voiced suspicion of the pseudo patients saying that they were fake and it was actually a journalist or professors checking up in hospitals.

In second study, at least one staff member wrong reported that 41/193 patients were fake with high confidence.

Staffed talked to patients in a dehumanising way, invaded privacy and ignoring patients requests.

Conclusions

Clinicians tend to report healthy people as sick rather than sick people as healthy.

Shows that psychiatrists cannot reliably tell the difference between sane and insane people.

Everthing a patient does in interpreted according to their diagnostic label eg. when patient was recoding observations, nurses records said 'patient engages in writing behaviour'.