Reflection on the Biological Approach
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, its processes, and functions, particularly how these effect behaviors. Psychologists’ goal is to describe, explain, predict, and control. Psychologists base their studies on different approaches, the cognitive approach, biological approach, humanistic approach, evolutionary approach, bio-psychosocial, psychoanalytical approach, and sociocultural approach. The biological approach is examines how an organisms biology, such as genes, hormones, and nervous system effect its behavior such as motivations, emotional responses, and personality.
The University of Colorado recently published a study that explains how an aspect of human biology connects to stress.
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Addictive substances cause an increase a neurotransmitter called dopamine, which goes to a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens and produces pleasurable sensations/responces. This pathway is called the reward pathway. Naturally dopamine release does not occur often, so when one repeatedly uses drugs that cause dopamine release receptor cells become overwhelmed and shut down. The brains ability to produce dopamine by itself decreases, but the need for it remains, creating a dependency on the substance. Addictive substances are classified into two catagories, stimulis and depressants. Stimulants such as cocaine stimulate the cntral nervouse system while depressants such as heroine depress the central nervous system. Cocaine is a powdery white substance that can be inhaled or injected, as listed above it is a stimulant that effects the central nervous system. Cocaine increases the levels of the dopamine in the brain. Normally dopamine is released and then recycled back into the cell that released it, therefore shutting down the signal of pleasure between neurons. Cocaine prevents the dopamine from getting recycled and causes a build up of it in the synapse, or space between neurons. This enhances the dopamine signal and therefore causes a flood of dopamine, which causes cocaine’s jittery energetic ‘high’. Cocaine is addictive due to the rush of dopamine and the cells inability to produces dopamine …show more content…
The biological approach does not take into account the social, economic, and environmental factors that play an important role in behavior and personality. For example, the biological approach would not be able to explain a person with extremely high intelligence if that person showed no particularly different brain functions or genetics. This person’s intelligence may have come from family factors or environmental factors, but the biological approach does not account for those. Another example would be if a patient had a mental breakdown , but had no family history of psychotic breakdowns and has a fully functioning brain. This breakdown may have resulted from work related stress or an interpersonal relationship, but once again the biological approach does not take these factors into
Psychology comprises of two words originally used by the ‘Greeks’, ‘psyche’, defining the mind, soul or spirit and lastly ‘logos’ being study. Both words define together the ‘study of the mind’. Psychology perspectives evaluate the normal and abnormal behaviour and how persons’ deal with different concepts of issues and problems. Psychology theories’ are based on ‘common sense’, but its scientific structure, everything needs to be evaluated and tested, therefore, promoting different psychological theories’.
Cocaine is a Schedule II drug, known for its addictive properties and permissive medicinal administration. Cocaine exists in two forms: water soluble and insoluble; these forms can enter the bloodstream by mechanism of oral ingestion, intravenous injection, inhalation, and intranasal inhalation (Volkow, 2010). Cocaine is a stimulus, therefore the use of cocaine stimulates the para-sympathetic nervous system, exciting physiological reactions, but also creating a sense of euphoria resulting from an increase in dopamine activity (Barlow & Durand, 2012). Cocaine is effective in stimulating euphoria because of the dopamine agonists properties it possesses (Carlson, 2013).
Psychology can be broadly defined as the scientific and systematic study of people’s behavior and mental processes.
There are many biological factors that are involved with the addicted brain. "The addicted brain is distinctly different from the nonaddicted brain, as manifested by changes in brain metabolic activity, receptor availability, gene expression, and responsiveness to environmental cues." (2) In the brain, there are many changes that take place when drugs enter a person's blood stream. The pathway in the brain that the drugs take is first to the ventral tegmentum to the nucleus accumbens, and the drugs also go to the limbic system and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is called the mesolimbic reward system. The activation of this reward system seems to be the common element in what hooks drug users on drugs (2).
The most commonly abused substances are Nicotine, Inhalants, Alcohol, Cocaine, Amphetamines, Prescription medications, Heroin, Ecstasy and Marijuana. 1a(National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2011) Initially, a person may find themselves using substances voluntarily and with confidence that they will be able to dictate their personal use. However, over the period of time that drug use is repeated, changes are taking place throughout the brain, whether it is functionally or structurally. Drugs contain chemicals that enter the communication system of the brain and disturb the way in which nerve cells would typically send, receive, and process information. The chemicals within these drugs will cause a disruption to the communication system by either imitating the brain’s natural chemical messengers or by over-stimulating the brains “reward system” by sending mass amounts of dopamine. As an individual prolongs his or her use of these substances, they may develop an addiction.
In Ap biology, we were handed a Campbell Textbook before the class began in order to complete the pre-modules. I consider the textbook to be the most beneficial resource that we had during this course, due to the amount of detail, examples, and images that it contained explaining each concepts in a reliable way. The power points that were made to summarize the main points from the textbook were helpful, however they were really long and made me miss what was actually important and take additional notes on filler information. Due to the long powerpoints, I felt implied to take long and details notes, which people struggled in this class, either taking too much or too less. After two units passed, we were taught how our notes should be, which will later help us in college. This strategy allowed me to understand the important information and identify the filler information, resulting in
The birth of psychology was in December of 1879, at Germanys University of Leipzig (Myers, 2014, p.2). In 1960, Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener defines psychology as “the science of mental health” (Myers, 2014, p.4). However, two provocative American psychologists, John Watson and B.F Skinner, redefined psychology in 1920. They redefined psychology as “the scientific study of observable behavior” (Myers, 2014, p.4). The problem arose when psychologists realized people could not observe feeling or thought so they needed to come up with a new definition for psychology. We define psychology today as “the science of behavior and mental processes” (Myers, 2014, p.4). Psychology includes many subfields such as human development, social behavior,
The term psychology has many meanings to different people, even to those who work within the psychological field. The word psychology derives from two Greek roots; 'psyche' refers to 'soul' or 'mind' and logo refers to 'the study of'. A more update definition of the word psychology can be found from Atkinson, et al (1991) “The scientific study of behaviours and mental processes.” However on Google Definitions the definition of psychology is “the mental characteristics and attitudes of a person” [accessed 16 September 2011], which gives somewhat of a contradiction. In this assignment I will be outlining and evaluating four key psychological perspectives. The psychological perspectives I have chosen are the behavioural approach, biological approach, cognitive approach and the psychodynamic approach.
Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, brain, and behavior. In psychology, and all of the other sciences, relying on opinions is abandoned in order to find out which explanations best fit the evidence or data given. Science continually forces us to question our findings and conclusions. Over time, psychology has advanced greatly and a main reason for such progressiveness is because of the change in the research model used.
Psychology is a social science that aims to study the mind and the behaviors of humans. It aims to understand what drives humans to act the way they do. It differs from sociology and anthropology in that it takes accounts the individual rather than society as a whole.
The biological approach emphasizes physical and biological bases of behaviour. It looks at how brain functions influence different behaviours and personality. The study of nervous system has played a major role in the development of biological approach to psychology. On the other hand, the psychoanalytic approach explains personality, motivation and psychological disorders by focusing on the influence of early childhood experiences, unconscious motives and conflicts. This essay attempts to explain biological and psychoanalytic approaches to psychology with focus on their core assumptions, key features, similarities and differences.
Unlike other psychology fields, biological psychology usually deal with biological functions of human brain. It tends to study how different areas of brain influence human behavior and how neurons associate with one-another. Social and cognitive psychologists mainly study the human behavior through social or interpersonal aspects, which the research methods in these fields usually correlate with observation and analysis, such as experimental research and survey research. However, the research methods in biological psychology are tend to be more scientific with numerous laboratory examinations than other psychology fields. Due to one of the central purposes of biological psychology is to understand human behavior in biological perspectives,
"The premise behind the biological perspective in psychology is that all actions, feelings, and thoughts are associated with bodily events." Biological psychologists examine how all of the electrical impulses, hormones, and chemicals flowing through the body can effect behavior and how changes to these bodily functions can change behavior. They are concerned with how the aspects of biology effect peoples' emotions, learning abilities, and their perception of events.
Without contrast, the primary reason for drug abuse in individuals comes from the conscious state of addiction. According to Webster’s, addiction is described as “the fact or condition of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity (Hacker, 2011).” Sure, human nature’s desire to conform to peer pressure might cause one to first try a certain drug, but the euphoric mental states found in drugs mentally trap many individuals into becoming dependent upon these sensations. With that being said, these sensations vary depending on the type of drug used.
Humans are environmentally and genetically predisposed to developing a motivated addictive behavior. Addiction is a brain disease and a behavior. All behaviors are choices. Choices that adolescences make at a young age directly affect the outcomes of their futures. Many factors contribute to an adolescence becoming an addict or exhibiting a drug seeking behavior. Nearly all drugs of abuse increase dopamine release. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter in drug abuse and addiction. Dopamine plays a role in reward motivated behaviors, motor control and important hormones. It’s known as the “feel good hormone” which is why people abuse drugs that increase the release of dopamine. Since life is unpredictable, our brains have evolved the ability to remodel themselves in response to our experiences. The more we practice an activity the more neurons developed in order to fine-tune that activity causing addictive behaviors to be detrimental.