Evaluations of the biological explanations for narcolepsy

Evaluations of the biological explanations for the causes of narcolepsy. PSY A3. Exam board: AQA.

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Evaluations of the biological explanations for narcolepsy

Advantages

  • Scientific and objective approach as scientific equipment would have been used to test the narcolepsy in the dogs, which makes it less likely that subjective reasoning would have intervened and avoids any bias.
  • Lab experiment method used, which means there would have been high control and the cause and effect relationship could have been established accurately.
  • Research supporting the role of genes in narcolepsy has also been found by Honda.

Disadvantages

  • There are ethical issues with selectively breeding a lifelong severe condition like narcolepsy into the dogs used. This means the animals were not protected from psychological and physical harms.
  • Reductionist explanation. The biological explanation reduces a complex disorder like narcolepsy to simple explanations. Other factors, such as psychological, are not considered.
  • Hard deterministic approach is taken by the biological explanations. The claim that a gene defect causes narcolepsy, and those with the gene are likely to develop narcolepsy, suggests that the individual has very little to no free will over the development of narcolepsy.

Evaluation

Due to the psychological and physiological differences between humans and dogs, there may be issues when trying to extrapolate results from the dogs used to humans. However, research has shown that dogs display similar symptoms of narcolepsy as humans, (such as cataplexy) and also respond to similar drugs like humans. Therefore, the differences between humans and dogs are not too large for the research into Orexin to also be applied to humans.

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