Biopsychology Research

•  Gray (1988) argues that the first stage of reaction to a threat is not fight-or-flight, but to avoid confrontation. He suggests that prior to responding with attacking or running away, most animals typically display the ‘freeze response’. This focuses attention and makes them look for new information in order to make the best response. 
• Lee and Harley (2012) have found evidence of a genetic basis for gender differences in the fight-or-flight response. The SRY gene, found in the male Y chromosome, directs male development, promoting aggression resulting in the fight-or-flight response which is different in women. 

• Rogers et al (2004) found that, in domestic chicken, brain lateralisation is associated with an enhanced ability to perform two tasks simultaneously. This finding does provide some evidence that brain lateralisation enhances brain efficiency in cognitive tasks in the simultaneous but different use of them. 
• The right hemisphere seems to be particulalry dominant for recognising emotions in others. Work has shown that, if a photo of a face that has been split so that one half is smiling and the other is neutral, is shown to someone, the emotion displayed in the left hand side of the picture is the emotions recognised by the participant (Heller & Levy, 1981). This is probably because their right hemisphere is dominant for this task. 

• The curious case of Phineas Gage. Whilst working on the railroad in 1848 while he was 25 years old Phineas was preparing to blast a section of rock with explosives to create a new railway line. During the process, Gage dropped his tamping iron onto the rock causing the explosive to ignite. The explosion hurled the metre-length pole through the Gage’s left cheek, passing behind his left eye, and exiting his skull from the top of his head taking a portion of his brain with it – most of his left frontal lobe. Incredibly, Gage survived but the damage to his brain had left a mark on his personality – by all accounts he had turned from someone who was calm and reserved to someone who was quick-tempered, rude and ‘no longer Gage’.
• Work by Lashley (1950) on rats’ brains did not find a specific area involved in memory. It appeared to be stored all over the brain. This would suggest that the idea of specific areas performing specific functions is a misnomer. However, caution should be used when generalising this to humans, due to physiological differences. 

• Work by Roger Sperry and colleagues (1974) documented the effects of the functioning of these individuals. Their findings are as follows:
• Certain unfamiliar functions such as stringing beads into a piece of thread cannot be performed, yet very familiar actions such as tying shoelaces can still be done. 
• In the first few weeks after surgery the hemispheres act separately, making the person feel like two people in one body. The left hemisphere takes control of situations and suppresses interference from the right hemisphere by using smaller pathways that connect the hemispheres. It is an adaptive process.
• In some patients, the hemispheres co-operate with each other. For example, if a colour is shown to the left visual field then the right hemisphere can see it, but the left cannot articulate the colour. As the left hemisphere is responsible for speech, when the person is asked what the colour is the left hemisphere will guess, as it cannot see it. The right hemisphere knows the answer, but cannot speak, so indicates that the answer is wrong by prompting a frown. 
• Some patients compensate for the lack of connectivity of the two hemispheres by using strategies such as turning their heads so both hemispheres can take in their environments. 

• Maguire et al (2000) studies London taxi drivers to discover whether changes in the brain could be detected as a result of their extensive experience of spatial navigation. Using an MRI scanner, the researchers calculated the amount of grey matter in the brains of taxi drivers and a set of control participants. The posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers was significantly larger relative to those of control participants and posterior hippocampal volume was positively correlated with the amount of time they had spent as a taxi driver. 
• David Hubel and Torten Weisel (1963) involved sewing one eye of a kitten shut and analysing the brains critical responses. It was found that the area of the visual cortex associated with the shut eye was not idle but continued to process information from the open eye. 

• Siffre (1975) performed a case study of a French man (using himself as the participnat) and spent six months in a cave with no natural light or cues as to the day or time. When he woke up he had artificial light to help him navigate within the cave and keep himself busy. His internal body clock was allowed to free-run and it settled into a sleep/wake cycle of between 25 and 30 hours. He lost track of how many days he had been in the cave, beliveing it to be one month less than he had actually stayed in. He was in the cave for a total of 179 days. This suggests that natural light sources in the environment are vital for keeping the individual to a 24-hour cycle. 
• Aschoff & Weber (1962) studied participants living in a bunker that had only electric light and no windows. The participants were allowed to turn lights on and off as they wished, so that the light source fitted with their body clocks. Eventually their body clocks settled into a sleep/wake cycle of 25 to 27 hours. This seems to suggest, like Siffre (1975), that we use our natural light source to entrain (adjust) our pacemakers with the environment and that the 24 hour clock is not in line with our natural bodily rhythms. 

Endogenous Pacemakers:

• Ralph et al (1990) removed the SCN out of gentically abnormal hamsters with only had a circadian cycle of 20 hours. They then transplanted the SCN cells into rats which had no such abnormality and functioned on the normal 24-hour cycle. Following the transplant the circadian rhythm of the rats shortened to 20 hours. This suggests that the SCN is pivitol in regulating the internal body clock.

Exogenous Zeitgebers:

• Campbell & Murphy (1998) monitored the body temperatures of 15 volunteers who slept in a laboratory. They introduced light to them during the night at a series of intervals by shining a beam of light onto the back of their knees. They were woken at different times and a light pad was shone on the back of their knees. Their circadian rhythms were disrupted by up to three hours. This shows that it is not necessary for light to just enter the eyes to have a physiological effect on the biological rhythms. 

• A 1967 study by Reinberg involved a woman spending three months in a cave with only the light of a small lamp. As a result of this her days lengthened to 24.9 hours and her mentrual cycle shortened to 25.7 days. This study shows that the levels of light in the cave could have affected the womans menstrual cycle. After the study it took her body a year to readjust her menstrual cycle. This research shows how infradian biological rhythms can be influenced by external zeitgebers such as light. 
• McClintock & Stern (1998) found that when women recieved 'odourless compounds' from the armpits of women in the latter half of their menstrual cycle, their menstrual cycle was shortened, presumably by the effect of the other womans' pheremones as they approached the end of their cycle. The compounds were transferred by the woman wiping a pad, which had previously been wiped across the donors' armpit, above their upper lip. However, if the compounds were collected from women at the beggining of their cycle, this had the opposite effect, lengthening the cycle of those who had recieved the compound. This shows that the menstrual cycle of a woman can be altered by communication via pheremones. 

• Dement & Kleitman (1957) monitored the sleep patterns of nine adult participants in a sleep lab. Brainwave activity was recorded on an EEG and the researchers controlled for the effects of caffeine and alcohol. REM activity during sleep was highly correlated with the experience of dreaming, brain activity varied according to how vivid dreams were, and participants woken during dreaming reported very accurate recall of their dreams. 

Post-Mortem - Brocas area was found via post-mortem 

EEG's - Dement & Kleitman (1957) monitored the sleep patterns of nine adult participants in a sleep lab. Brainwave activity was recorded on an EEG and the researchers controlled for the effects of caffeine and alcohol. REM activity during sleep was highly correlated with the experience of dreaming, brain activity varied according to how vivid dreams were, and participants woken during dreaming reported very accurate recall of their dreams. 

ERP's - Costa, Braun & Birbaumer (2003) used this method to record responses to nude pictures of both sexes in young people. When asked about how they felt, men generally said they were aroused by the nude female pictures, whereas females mostly reported to have neutral feeling to both male and female nude pictures. However, when Costa and colleagues examined the ERP's of both males and females they found a higher response rate to opposite-sex nude pictures than reported by the participants. This suggest that this method of measuring activity hhas greater accuracy than self-report. 

FMRI - Li et al (2010) performed a meta-analysis of fMRI studies investigating the difficulties schizophrenics often have in processing facial emotions, to find that although both schizophrenics and non-sufferers activate the bilateral amygdala and right fusiform gyri when processing facial emotions, the activation was severely limited in schizophrenics. This suggests that abnormal brain functioning in schizophrenics may explain their difficulties in processing facial emotions.