Clinical and Social Psychology

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Clinical psychology is the scientific application of psychology with an aim to understand individuals, families, or groups’ dysfunction and in the process promote personnel development. It is a regulated mental health study that involves psychotherapy and psychological assessment. Social psychology on the other hand concerns itself with the behavior of people in a society. While psychology focuses on the individual’s feelings and behavior sociology is centered on the interaction of people

A clash between an idea and an individuals’ perception causes uncomfortable feelings. This arises from a logical inconsistency. Induced compliance without sufficient justification causes cognitive dissonance. The clinician can draw information from studying the social behavior of the client. For instance, a smoker’s desire to live long is dissonant with smoking because the latter causes cancer and reduces his chances of living.

The social psychology of the smoker informs the clinician on the attitude and beliefs held by the client. The first task of the clinician is to change the attitude of the client. An understanding of the client’s background information is crucial to the treatment and promotion of subjective well-being. To the client, there is a need to understand the behavior pattern as a means of accepting the situation and facilitate behavior change.

Social psychology informs the clinician why traits in people occur as it appears. To the clinician, it is important to infer the behavior of the client in a social group. Internal attribution is in the case where the cause of a behavior is attributed to internal factors within the personality. In the explanation of a client’s behavior, internal attribution informs the clinician of the client’s attitude, belief, and character. External attributions explain the consequences of behavior as hinged to the environment in which the action was done.

Internal and external attributions lead to different perceptions of individuals. The clinician is able to apply this concept of social psychology in treating psychological disorders. A person’s internal and situational engagement in a behavior explains why attributions about another person’s behavior are deficient in the external factors. Schacter, (1982) convincingly illuminates the creative mental reconstructions in the process of memory. He points out that memory is affected by the disease. In the understanding of the human mind, the clinician is presented with an opportunity to draw from the client’s memory pattern.

Reconstructive memory is essential for envisioning future events. Memory is a reconstructive process that involves recalling by storing abstract features which are used in the future to recollect the memory. This is an essential process for both the therapist and the client. For instance, a client who has lost memory is taken through a process of reconstruction to build up and recollect the mental faculties. Social psychology is pivotal to the therapist in building up scenes for the client to connect and build up the desired response. Group interactions are important in memory reconstruction. Daniel Schacter (1982) argues that the brain has the power and limitation of the mental record. Hence mental reconstruction is essential for the search for memory.

The clinician becomes an expert in providing psychotherapy to the client when equipped with the knowledge of a client’s psychological functioning. Clinical observation entails the gathering of data by observation. A theory of how people explain things has influenced possibilities in clinical psychology. Attribution tends to explain why people behave the way they do. A client’s mental ability to store and retain information is influenced by socio-psychological concepts. To understand and explain how a client’s feelings and behavior are influenced, the therapist draws resources from social psychology.

Social loafing and social facilitation

In the psychology of groups, the tendency of people to put in less effort to achieve cooperate objectives is referred to as social loafing. (Karau and Williams 1993) articulates that social loafing is caused by a feeling of dissatisfaction and un-motivation in a group. In social psychology social loafing details the objectives and tasks of the group. Motivation is a key remedy for social loafing to encourage members to collaborate in a meaningful working environment.

On the other hand, people in a social group exhibit tendency to work better under the eye of people. This habit is dominant in people who are concerned about their image and opinions of people. This is social facilitation. The audience effect is very instrumental in shaping the behavior of an individual. Social facilitation is also influenced by the co-actor effect. This is the competition with others. For instance, in a cycling race, the presence of other competitors increases the speed of a cyclist, and attention is paid to improve performance.

While social facilitation is enhanced by the presence of other people who in turn makes a person work better, social loafing on the other hand entails a person’s demoralization in the presence of others. The difference between social facilitation and social loafing is mainly in the role of the present people influence the behavior of a person. The former is the tendency for people to perform well on simple tasks and worse on a complex tasks where their performance is evaluated. The latter, the presence of people relaxes a person’s effort in a group because individual performance cannot be evaluated. A person’s performance in the group is greatly hinged on the influence of the group members. Evaluation of individual performance in the presence of other people arouses and improves performance on simple tasks (social facilitation). Performance that cannot be individually evaluated in the presence of other people decreases performance on simple tasks (social loafing).

Biological factors involved in personality development range from the genetic component, disease, and biological correlations such as physiological arousal and neurochemical changes. Personality seems to become stronger and people respond differently to situations due to inherent features of the nervous system that are inborn and caused by biological factors. Biological contribution to intelligence is the application of a biological mechanism by which the effects of complexity of stimuli are unified to produce potentials and abilities. The distribution of I.Q. follows a normal distribution curve pegged on biological factors underpinning achievement. Biological factors such as hormones contribute to behavior genetics in psychopathology. The manifestations of behavior and experiences can be related to biological factors such as mental illness exhibited in hallucination. The vulnerability of people to deal with stress varies because of a strong genetic element. The difference in people’s vulnerability is seen in biological factors associated with susceptibility to posttraumatic stress disorder.

To sum up, biological factors have great implications for intelligence, personality, psychopathology, and stress vulnerability. The biological factors involved in their products result in the difference in the human attributes displayed by people. Both clinician and the client draw resources for clinical psychology upon interaction with social psychology. An understanding of a client’s social subscriptions is essential for the therapist’s practice.

References

Schacter, D.L (1982)Stranger behind the engram: of memory and the psychology of science. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Web.
Wegner D.M and Pannebaker, J.W. (Eds) (1993). Handbook of mental control. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice – Hall. Web.

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Clinical and Social Psychology

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