Jane’s case study for psychosocial analysis

Psychology is a scientific study of behavior and how the mind works. Psychology has four key goals; to describe, to explain, to predict, and to change. The four goals will be used to examine Jane’s situation in the case study as illustrated below (Plotnik, & Kouyoumdjian, 2013).

Describing

Jane has grown through an abusive relationship with her father and has developed a self-defense mechanism for survival. She uses guilt to get what she want from her father, and the same skill is applied against her husband.

Explain

Jane’s behavior for manipulating her offenders by inducing their guilt, have developed over time from her relationships. She realizes that once a person feels guilty, emotions of compassion and the need to reconcile will push them to treat her better and with value.

Predict

The reason her behavior is consistent and successful is drawn from her experiences. She makes her father please her by offering money to win her love. Her husband beats her after an argument, she makes him feel guilty which leads him to ask her out for a shopping spree.

Control

She would probably use the guilt mechanism against her children to compel them perform tasks she assigns to them. She would use this skill to manage the society around her since it has worked in her most significant relations.

Choose three of the modern perspectives of psychology and address how each would study the behaviors found in the case study.
Perspectives of psychology are categorized into various dimensions explaining why human beings think and behave the way they do.

The first perspective is behavior perspective that was pioneered by J.B Watson. He suggested that a psychological study should focus only on observable behavior (Plotnik, & Kouyoumdjian, 2013). He suggested that the unobserved should be considered fiction. From the perspective, we can observe that once Jane is offended he arouses guilt in her offenders as a self- defensive mechanism.

The second is a cognitive perspective that suggest that human behaviors and thinking is a combination of cognitive processes. Based on belief, value, memory, attention and language (Plotnik, & Kouyoumdjian, 2013). Jane uses the basis of her memory of transiting from constant beating to constant reward by her father as a sign of love. She uses the prompt guilt system to control her offender.

The third is the socio-cultural context perspective, here the culture with the society control the savior and thinking. She grew up knowing that her father was right in beating her to restore good moral. She later realizes that her father has been beating her for fear of fail, and he uses that against him.

References

Plotnik, R., & Kouyoumdjian, H. (2013). Introduction to psychology. Cengage Learning.