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Introduction to Psychology and its Foundations

Defining Psychology for OHS Professionals

  • Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.
  • It helps OHS professionals understand human responses to hazards, injury occurrence, and prevention.
  • Modern psychology employs scientific rigor in examining human behavior.

Distinguishing Psychology from Psychiatry

  • Psychiatrists hold medical degrees, specialize in mental illness, and can prescribe medication.
  • Psychologists study psychology, assist with daily problems (stress, relationships), and treat mental illness without prescribing medication.
  • Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) is a specialist field contributing to understanding psychological injury in the workplace.

Historical Development of Modern Psychology

  • Roots in philosophy and 19th-century physiology; Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology lab in 1879 (structuralism).
  • William James introduced functionalism to understand the mind's function.
  • Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theory focused on the unconscious mind but was largely discredited by objective psychology.
  • Early 20th century saw the rise of Behaviorism (Watson, Skinner) focusing on observable behavior, influencing psychobiology.
  • The 'cognitive revolution' (1960s-1970s) inferred mental processes from observable behavior; Occupational Health Psychology emerged from early 1900s industrial applications.

Psychobiology: Brain, Stress, and Health Impacts

Overview of Psychobiology

  • Psychobiology is the study of the biology of the psyche, including the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the mind.
  • It highlights that psychological phenomena have physiological bases and potential health consequences.
  • Psychological hazards are physiologically mediated through psychobiological interactions within the body's systems.

Structure and Function of the Brain

  • The Central Nervous System (CNS) includes the brain and spinal cord; the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS) links the CNS to muscles and glands.
  • The PNS is divided into the somatic nervous system (skeletal muscles) and the autonomic nervous system (visceral muscles and glands).
  • The autonomic nervous system comprises the sympathetic (mobilizes for threat) and parasympathetic (calms the body) systems.
  • Brain lobes (Occipital, Parietal, Frontal, Temporal) have primary functions like visual processing, tactile processing, reasoning, and auditory processing respectively.
  • Subcortical structures (limbic system) like the hippocampus (memory) and amygdala (emotions), and the hypothalamus (basic needs, links brain to endocrine system), play crucial roles.

Physiological Consequences of Stress

  • The stress response involves activation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and the sympathetic nervous system (SNS).
  • SNS activation releases adrenaline, elevating heart rate/blood pressure and preparing for 'fight or flight'.
  • The HPA axis releases cortisol, a glucocorticoid essential for energy regulation.
  • Chronic or severe stress can lead to immunosuppressive effects, a field known as psychoneuroimmunology.
  • Stress can influence cardiovascular disease through impacts on lifestyle behaviors and SNS effects, as demonstrated by studies like the Whitehall studies.

Behavioural Psychology: Learning and Reinforcement

Core Concepts and Applications

  • Behavioural psychology is often referred to as 'the psychology of learning' or 'learning and motivation'.
  • It has direct applications in Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) interventions.

Classical and Operant Conditioning

  • Classical conditioning (Pavlov) involves pairing a stimulus that produces a natural response with a neutral stimulus until the neutral stimulus alone elicits the response.
  • Operant conditioning (Thorndike's Law of Effect, Skinner) states that behavior is controlled by its consequences (Stimulus → Response → Reinforcement).
  • The principles of operant conditioning are applied in behaviour-based safety through the Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequences (ABC) model.

Types of Reinforcement

  • Positive reinforcement: producing a desirable reinforcer to increase a response (e.g., reward for good behavior).
  • Punishment: producing an undesirable reinforcer to decrease a response (e.g., time out for bad behavior).
  • Omission training: removing a desirable reinforcer to decrease a response (e.g., losing a treat for fighting).
  • Negative reinforcement: removing an undesirable reinforcer to increase a response (e.g., spraying for spiders to remove aversion).
  • While criticized for its deterministic view, behavioral psychology effectively explains and modifies behaviors.

Learned Helplessness

  • Learned helplessness (Seligman, 1967) describes how exposure to inescapable adverse stimuli leads to passive acceptance.
  • These experiments highlighted the importance of stimulus controllability for subsequent behavior.
  • The theory was applied to human depression, proposing that perceived helplessness leads to attributing negative outcomes to stable, global, internal causes.

Cognitive Psychology: Information Processing and Biases

Cognitive Architecture and Memory Models

  • Cognitive psychology developed from behaviorism's limitations and advances in information technology, focusing on human information processing and storage.
  • The Wickens Information-Processing Model illustrates sensory input, perception, decision-making, memory interaction, and response execution.
  • Memory models include Hebb's short/long-term distinction, Miller's 'magical number seven' for short-term capacity, and Atkinson and Shiffrin's modal model (sensory, short-term, long-term store).
  • Craik and Lockhart's 'level of processing' model suggests deeper semantic encoding leads to better retention.
  • Baddeley and Hitch's working memory model includes a phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and central executive; Tulving categorized long-term memory into episodic, semantic (declarative), and procedural.

Cognitive Biases in Decision Making

  • People use heuristics (rules of thumb) under uncertainty, which can lead to judgment biases (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).
  • Key heuristics include representativeness (stereotyping), availability (recalling instances), and adjustment from an anchor (insufficiently adjusting from an initial guess).
  • Issues interpreting probabilities include interpreting low probabilities as zero, varied interpretation of probability terms, and optimism bias (bad things less likely to happen to oneself).
  • Hindsight bias is the tendency to say 'I knew it all along' after an event occurs, changing earlier risk estimates.

Biases in Causal Attribution

  • Fundamental attribution error: overemphasizing internal causes over external causes when judging others' behavior (e.g., blaming worker for accident, not equipment).
  • Just-world hypothesis: believing victims deserve injustice because of their actions.
  • Interpreting correlation as causation: assuming two co-occurring events are causally linked without considering other variables.

Personality Psychology and Mental Disorders

Personality Theories and Models

  • Allport's influential definition of personality emphasizes dynamic organization of psychophysical systems determining characteristic behavior and thought.
  • The trait approach describes individuals by enduring dispositions that predict behavior, with Allport's hierarchic model (cardinal, central, secondary traits).
  • The interactionist approach views personality as an interaction between behaviors and situations.
  • The generally accepted Five-Factor Model (Big Five) includes Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
  • Caution is needed due to context/task dependence and the trait-state distinction (traits are enduring, states like moods are transitory).

Personality Testing and Accident Proneness

  • Personality profiling is used for job selection, but evidence is not always conclusive, and some tests are based on outdated theories.
  • Specialist psychological advice should be sought for workplace personality measures.
  • The concept of an 'accident-prone personality' (popular 1920s-1960s) suggesting enduring individual differences causing accidents has been largely discredited.
  • Accident 'proneness' was found to be transient, with no permanent personality trait identified.
  • Modern OHS focuses on the interaction between individual behavior, the work environment, and task features, rather than solely on individual 'proneness'.

Categories and Treatment of Mental Disorders

  • OHS professionals should be aware of psychiatric illness categories (APA, 2000), with Mood and Anxiety Disorders being most relevant to work.
  • Depression symptoms include moodiness, irritability, social withdrawal, loss of interest, sleep disturbances, increased substance use, and physical complaints.
  • Anxiety disorders encompass Agoraphobia, Specific Phobia, Social Phobia, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Panic Attack, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Acute Stress Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
  • Diagnosis requires trained clinicians using resources like the DSM-IV-TR, and self-diagnosis is inappropriate.
  • Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), often combined with pharmacotherapy, is a common treatment, focusing on modifying behaviors and challenging dysfunctional thoughts.

Applying Psychology in OHS Practice

General Implications for OHS

  • A solid knowledge of basic psychology is fundamental for OHS professional practice.
  • Understanding human actions, responses, and environmental interactions is crucial for improving workplace safety.
  • Cognitive biases, such as attribution error and the just-world hypothesis, can significantly influence perceptions and attributions of risk.

Incentive Schemes in OHS

  • Incentive schemes typically offer rewards for appropriate behavior or penalties for 'unsafe' behavior to improve OHS statistics.
  • These schemes can take forms like token economies or tiered rewards for injury-free performance.
  • Different schedules of reinforcement and the partial reinforcement effect influence the effectiveness of these schemes.
  • Problems include potential manipulation of performance measures and the oversimplified assumption that OHS risk is solely due to worker behavior.
  • Incentive schemes are not a complete Behaviour-Based Safety (BBS) approach as they often lack observation, feedback, and data analysis.

Behaviour-Based Safety (BBS) Approach

  • BBS, based on behavioral psychology, uses applied behavior analysis to achieve continuous improvement in safety performance.
  • It involves identifying and defining critical safety behaviors, observing their frequency, providing feedback, and using data for continuous improvement.
  • Successful BBS requires significant employee involvement and aims to change the safety culture by leveraging the nature of behavior.
  • Geller's seven key principles of BBS include focusing on observable behavior, external factors, activators/consequences, positive consequences, the scientific method, integrated theory, and internal feelings/attitudes.

ABC Analysis and the Scientific Method in BBS

  • The Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequence (ABC) model is central to BBS, focusing on positive reinforcement of safe behaviors.
  • Antecedents are triggers (time pressures, unclear rules, environment), and consequences are outcomes that follow behaviors (comfort, time saving, peer esteem, avoiding injury).
  • Krause noted that safety programs fail when over-reliant on antecedents without strong, timely, consistent, and significant consequences.
  • Geller's 'DO IT' process (Define, Observe, Intervene, Test) applies the scientific method: Define behaviors (Specific, Observable, Objective, Naturalistic), Observe for baseline, Intervene with strategies (instructional, supportive, motivational, self-directed), and Test impact.
  • Observation must be fact-finding and supportive, not fault-finding, to guide individuals from 'unconscious incompetence' to 'unconscious competence' (safe habit formation), often revealing organizational issues.

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