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What Are Biological Factors In Psychology

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The Nervous And Endocrine System

Biological and Environmental Influences on Intelligence | Psychology

The nervous system has a lot of key players in the performance of our day-to-day living. There is the taking in mass amounts of information, the making of decisions, and then conveying that to the many areas of our body.

Who are the key players in all this information processing?

The Nervous System

The brain and the spinal cord are the decision-makers of the central nervous system you can think of them collectively as the team captain. The assistant to the captain is the peripheral nervous system , which takes the messages from the central nervous system and shares it with the rest of the body or team members. Nerves are the links between the muscles, glands, and sensory receptors of the body. For example, the olfactory nerve of the body is in charge of smell. The nervous system information travels to three different types of neurons sensory neurons, motor neurons, and interneurons. The sensory neurons are the message carriers from the sensory receptors to the brain and spinal cord. The motor neurons take messages and instructions from the central nervous system to the glands and muscles. Those messages are then processed by the brain by the interneurons, or the body’s internal way of communicating.

The Peripheral Nervous System

S Of Studying The Brain

Methods of Studying the Brain

It is important to appreciate that the human brain is an extremely complicated piece of biological machinery. Scientists have only just âscratched the surfaceâ of understanding the many functions of the workings of the human brain. The brain can influence many types of behavior.

In addition to studying brain damaged patients, we can find out about the working of the brain in three other ways.

Children begin to plan activities, make up games, and initiate activities with others. If given this opportunity, children develop a sense of initiative and feel secure in their ability to lead others and make decisions.

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Imagine wanting to take apart a computer system to better understand how it works internally. There are so many different components that are necessary for the computer to work properly, such as the central processing unit or motherboard. Imagine, now, the internal processes of the body, and how they equate to behaviors that we experience.

The biological processes of the brain can explain human behaviors and have been studied as such for centuries. Biological psychology is the study of the link between biological functions and psychological functions. Let’s begin with a look at the communicators of the brain, the neurons.

  • What are neurotransmissions?
  • What are the key parts of the central nervous system?

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Environmental Causes Of Autism

Studies looking into the interplay between nature and nurture in the development of autism have identified certain environmental factors that could be playing a role in the development of autism.

Karimi et al. identified different environmental influences that impacted autism in their literature review. These were the following:

  • Parental age: the literature suggested that an increased risk of developing autism was present when parents were 34 years old or older.
  • Maternal physical health: having experienced an infection during pregnancy was also identified as a risk factor for developing autism.
  • Maternal mental health: parental mental health was also associated with children’s mental health. Therefore, if the mother had experienced a mental illness, the child was more likely to develop autism.
  • Maternal medication use: the maternal intake of drugs has also been suggested to be a risk factor for children’s development of autism. These studies investigated this link with various drugs, including antidepressants, psychiatric medication, pain killers and anti-epileptic drugs.
  • Familial socio-economical status: the family’s economic, social, educational and psychological well-being can also set children at a higher risk of developing autism. For example, stress and anxiety in the household can make children more prone to autism.
  • What Are Social And Biological Factors That Influence Human Behavior

    Pin on biopsychosocial model

    write552 answers. starTop subjects are Literature, History, and Law and Politics. Biological factors that influence human behavior can consist of our drive to be warm, fed, sheltered, have companionship , and be free from harm and oppression.

    How are character traits related to biological factors?

    Certain character traits can indicate a predisposition for issues with physical or mental health, such as aggression or impulsiveness leading to criminal tendencies. Although a person isnt defined by biological factors, these conditions can have a major impact on his or her behavior.

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    What Biological Factors Are Involved In Mental Illness

    Some mental illnesses have been linked to abnormal functioning of nerve cell circuits or pathways that connect particular brain regions. Nerve cells within these brain circuits communicate through chemicals called neurotransmitters. “Tweaking” these chemicals — through medicines, psychotherapy or other medical procedures — can help brain circuits run more efficiently. In addition, defects in or injury to certain areas of the brain have also been linked to some mental conditions.

    Other biological factors that may be involved in the development of mental illness include:

    The Hippocampus And The Frontal Lobes

    The captains of the memory team in our brains are the hippocampus, the frontal lobe, and the temporal lobe. The hippocampus is located in the limbic system, and it is in charge of forming our long-term explicit memories. Theseexplicit memoriescan be images, events, or names and require conscious effort for us to recall them. Both the frontal and temporal lobes work with our memory, and each lobe is in charge of different kinds of memories.

    In the frontal lobe, you use your short-term memory to recall information like the name of the barista who served you coffee this morning.

    HIPPOcampus and Memory, pexels.com

    While your hippocampus and two of your lobes are busy with your explicit memories, there are other areas of the brain that are responsible for yourimplicit memories. These types of memories are unconsciousprocesses based on past experiences or learned skills and behavior that are stored in our long-term memory and require little to no effort for us to recall. Since they are based on past experiences, implicit memories can impact our current thoughts, feelings, and behaviors .

    Explicit memories are not stored in the hippocampus. They go through the hippocampus for processing before moving on to long-term storage. If there is damage to the hippocampus, it causes problems with moving explicit memories like episodic memories into long-term memory.

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    What Is The Biological Approach

    The biological perspective proposes that biological structures and their functions determine our behaviour and thoughts. These functions could be neurones, parts of the brain, neurotransmitters, genes, or any structure we can find in a living being. In contrast to the cognitive approach, in the biological approach, the mind is not seen as separate from the physical makeup of our bodies. There is no ‘ghost in the machine’ instead, the physical machine made of cells, atoms and biological structures is the mind.

    How Does Biological Factors Influence Health

    What is biological psychology or behavioral neuroscience?

    Some biological and genetic factors affect specific populations more than others. For example, older adults are biologically prone to being in poorer health than adolescents due to the physical and cognitive effects of aging. Sickle cell disease is a common example of a genetic determinant of health.

    What are biological environmental factors?

    Biological factors such as breeding behavior, care of young, time of last eating, and food storage cause changes in daily activity patterns. Similarly, environmental factors such as temperature, snow cover, food supply and disturbance caused by humans in an urban setting also cause changes in daily activity patterns.

    Which is an example of a biological factor?

    Some examples of social factors that influence human behavior include gender and race. Some examples of biological factors that influence human behavior include the drive to take care of ones own young and other genetic influences that impact how individuals respond to an environment.

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    Physical Health And Development

    In development, the proper function of our primary senses is crucial in movement and sensation. How we balance ourselves, move our muscles and joints, and interpret touch are important biological factors in our development. There are three major systems for such functions — the vestibular system, proprioceptive system, and tactile system. So what do each of these do during our development?

    1. Tactile touch system – Helps us differentiate between sensations on the skin. These sensations include pain, temperature, and pressure. An example is a child touching snow for the first time. The tactile touch system will send signals saying “this is really cold”.

    2. The vestibular system is in charge of keeping us balanced as we walk. It allows us to interpret the sensation of gravity and movement.

    3. The proprioceptive system processes information from joints and muscles. This system allows us to understand our different body parts and how they move. It can make you aware of your body movement and body position

    Poor Parenting Abuse And Neglect

    Poor parenting is a risk factor for depression and anxiety. Separation or bereavement in families, and childhood trauma, be risk factors for psychosis and schizophrenia.

    Severe psychological trauma, such as abuse, can wreak havoc on a person’s life. Children are much more susceptible to psychological harm from traumatic events than adults. Once again, the reaction to the trauma will vary based on the person and the individual’s age. Many factors impact these children. Many factors include the type of event, the length of exposure, and how the individual was affected. Study shows that human-induced trauma, such as a tumultuous childhood, affects children even more than natural disasters.

    Neglect is a type of maltreatment related to the failure to provide needed, age-appropriate care, supervision, and protection. It is not to be confused with abuse, which, in this context, is defined as any action that intentionally harms or injures another person. Neglect most often happens during childhood by the parents or caretakers. Parents who are guilty of neglect were also neglected as children. The long-term effects of neglect are reduced physical, emotional, and mental health in a child and throughout adulthood.

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    Is Psychology A Biological Science

    Psychology has evolved as a biological and social science with its beginnings in philosophy. As a science, psychology also overlaps with other scientific fields such as anatomy, biology, neuroscience and physiology. As a social science, psychology overlaps with the disciplines of anthropology and sociology.

    Psychological And Individual Factors Including Resilience

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    Some clinicians believe that psychological characteristics alone determine mental disorders. Others speculate that abnormal behavior can be explained by a mix of social and psychological factors. In many examples, environmental and psychological triggers complement one another resulting in emotional stress, which in turn activates a mental illness. Each person is unique in how they will react to psychological stressors. What may break one person may have little to no effect on another. Psychological stressors, which can trigger mental illness, are as follows: emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, loss of a significant loved one, neglect, and being unable to relate to others.

    The inability to relate to others is also known as emotional detachment. Emotional detachment makes it difficult for an individual to empathize with others or to share their feelings. An emotionally detached person may try to rationalize or apply logic to a situation to which there is no logical explanation. These individuals tend to stress the importance of their independence and maybe a bit neurotic. Often, the inability to relate to others stems from a traumatic event.

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    Biological Mechanisms Of Long

    Our hippocampus is the brain’s version of a save button, but it’s not a permanent storage center for our memories. Instead, the hippocampus is more of a transitional storage unit for memories that will move on later. The hippocampus also likes to work overtime. While we sleep, our hippocampus is working hard to solidify our memories. What else happens in our memory while we sleep?

    If you look at a brain scan of someone who is sleeping, you will see a conversation happening in the neural connections between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex. During sleep, our hippocampus replays memories from the day and transfers them to the cerebral cortex for storage in long-term memory.

    Sleep is important for many reasons, but it is especially important in memory. When we do not get enough sleep, it can negatively affect our memory! Sleep helps maintain the plasticity of neural connections, which are super important for storing and retrieving memories. Sleep also helps with consolidation: putting together new memories from the day before with older material.

    Medical Or Biomedical Model

    An overall distinction is also commonly made between a “medical model” and a “social model” of mental disorder and disability, with the former focusing on hypothesized disease processes and symptoms, along with latter focusing on hypothesized social constructionism and social contexts.

    Biological psychiatry has tended to follow a biomedical model focused on organic or “hardware” pathology of the brain, where many mental disorders are conceptualized as disorders of brain circuits shaped by a complex interplay of genetics and experience.

    The social and medical models of mental disorders each work to identify and study distinct aspects, solutions, and potential therapies of disorders. The intersection and cross reference between the two models can further be used to develop more holistic models of mental disorders. Many criticisms historically of each model is the exclusivity of the other perspective. Therefore, intersectional research improved the impact and importance of future findings.

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    Assumption 3 Of The Biological Approach: Neurochemicals Are The Basis Of Behaviour

    A lot of behaviour can be explained by the presence or absence of specific messenger chemicals in the brain- specifically neurotransmitters, hormones and immune system messengers.

    The biological model that would explain why people have schizophrenia is that they have an excess of the neurotransmitter dopamine in their brains. Treating this excess of dopamine with medicine alleviates the symptoms of schizophrenia, which speaks for neurochemicals playing a big part in the illness and consequently on behaviour.

    Biological Bases Of Learning And Memory

    Biological theory | Behavior | MCAT | Khan Academy

    What if we added learning to the process of memory? How does learning and remembering what we learn work in the brain? It all begins within our neurons or brain cells. Learning happens when there is a change in the strength and number of neural pathways in the brain. This process of creating neural pathways is known as synaptic plasticity.

    The more you do something or repeat information, the stronger those neural pathways become, and the less likely you are to forget those things! The less you do something or repeat information, the weaker those neural pathways become, until the brain prunes those connections entirely . If you want to become really good at something, use those brain connections as much as possible!

    If neuron A continuously communicates with neuron B, there is constant energy flowing through that connection. When neurons constantly communicate with each other, this is called long-term potentiation . If neuron A never talks to neuron B, no energy flows between those two connections. This is called long-term depression .The less energy that flows between two neurons, the weaker the connection becomes. The more energy that flows, the stronger the connection becomes!

    Practicing, pexels.com

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    What Is The Biological Perspective Of Psychology

    The biological perspective is a way of looking at psychological issues by studying the physical basis for animal and human behavior. It is one of the major perspectives in psychology and involves such things as studying the brain, immune system, nervous system, and genetics.

    What psychological perspective is social psychology?

    Generally, the symbolic interactionist perspective in social psychology focuses on studying the meanings that underlie social interactions in terms of how they are created, how they are maintained, and how we learn to understand such meanings.

    What is the psychological perspective that emphasizes the influence of biology on behavior?

    biological perspectiveThe biological perspective of psychology emphasizes the influence of biology on our behavior. The evolutionary perspective focuses on the evolution of behavior and mental processes.

    What Are The Seven Modern Perspectives Of Psychology

    Here are seven of the major perspectives in modern psychology.

    • The Psychodynamic Perspective.
    • The Humanistic Perspective.

    Which modern perspective focuses on the interaction of biological psychological social and cultural forces?

    Health psychology focuses on how health is affected by the interaction of biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. This particular approach is known as the biopsychosocial model .

    What is the focus of the modern biological perspective of psychology quizlet?

    ~ The biological perspective of psychology emphasizes the influence of biology on our history. ~ Biologically oriented psychologists focus on connections between the brain and behavior. ~ They also focus on the influences of hormones and genes.

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    Assumption 2 Of The Biological Approach: Brain Functions Are Localised

    Biopsychology assumes that different parts of the brain have different functions, rather than the whole brain working at all times. There are many methods for studying brain anatomy, including brain imaging like fMRI, PETscans, post mortems, or studying the behaviour of people who have pre-existing brain damage. Research has revealed that different areas of the brain correlate with specific functions.

    One of the ways that brain localisation can be proved, is through transcranial magnetic stimulation , which temporarily blocks the electrical activity of specific parts of the brain. Depending on which specific brain areas are targeted, people lose speech or control of their hands for a minute or two . This demonstrates that specific regions in the brain control the normal use of the brain.

    From Structuralism To Functionalism

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    As structuralism struggled to survive the scrutiny of the scientific method, new approaches to studying the mind were sought. One important alternative was functionalism, founded by William James in the late 19th century, described and discussed in his two-volume publication The Principles of Psychology . Built on structuralisms concern for the anatomy of the mind, functionalism led to greater concern about the functions of the mind, and later on to behaviourism.

    One of Jamess students, James Angell, captured the functionalist perspective in relation to a discussion of free will in his 1906 text Psychology:An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness:

    Functionalism considers mental life and behaviour in terms of active adaptation to the persons environment. As such, it provides the general basis for developing psychological theories not readily testable by controlled experiments such as applied psychology. William Jamess functionalist approach to psychology was less concerned with the composition of the mind than with examining the ways in which the mind adapts to changing situations and environments. In functionalism, the brain is believed to have evolved for the purpose of bettering the survival of its carrier by acting as an information processor. In processing information the brain is considered to execute functions similar to those executed by a computer and much like what is shown in Figure 2.3 below of a complex adaptive system.

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