Core Concept of Psychology - Assignment Example

Rosenhan selected a group of volunteers who “admitted themselves” into different mental hospitals and pretended to be psychologically unstable by acting in a similar way to mental hospital patients; the result was that none of the staff at those hospitals noticed that the volunteers were all normal people who were just trying to prove a point. All they said told the hospital staff was that they heard voices that seemed to say “empty”, “thud”, and “hollow”, and did not claim any other symptoms (Zimbardo, Johnson &McCann 541).

They even tried to act as normal as possible, but were readily admitted into 12 different mental hospitals - some even twice - (Zimbardo, Johnson & McCann 541). The result was that they spent an average of 19 days in the hospitals convincing the staff that they were ready to go home, and during this time they were treated like “cases”, not persons (Zimbardo, Johnson & McCann 542). This shows that even mental hospitals use flawed criteria to diagnose psychological disorders. . Psychologists who use insight therapy believe that people with psychological disorders suffer from an inability to understand disordered thoughts, motives, and emotions that underlie their mental problems, and that mental problem lies hidden deep in patients’ unconscious (Zimbardo, Johnson & McCann 588).

This approach is therefore aimed at exposing and altering the disturbed mental processes of patients through interpretation and discussion. Insight therapies include Freudian psychoanalysis, neo-Freudian psychodynamic therapies, cognitive therapies, group therapies, and humanistic therapies (Zimbardo, Johnson & McCann 588-594). The second approach is behavior therapies and is used when the disorder in question is concerned with anything that can be described purely in behavioral terms (Zimbardo, Johnson & McCann 594).