Physiological Psychology Course Blog

Link: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150420111357.htm   The highly informative journal article written in Science Daily involves a team of scientists utilizing a new discovery approach to identify drugs which possess the capability of activating mouse   brain stem cells. Fascinatingly the two topical drugs, Miconazole and Clobetasol; one is used to treat athletes foot and the other is used to treat eczema, were discovered to be able to stimulate the regeneration of damaged brain cells and reverse the effects of muscular paralysis in animal models of multiple sclerosis. As a result, the team of scientists believe that the two topical drugs could potentially be utilized in the future to effectively treat individuals afflicted with multiple sclerosis. The researchers’ objective was to identify drugs that could reproduce the body’s own stem cells as a means of replacing the damaged cells caused by multiple sclerosis.   The drugs discovered,could potent...

  Link: http://rubin.rub.de/en/how-children-perceive-faces In the article “How Children Perceive Faces” by Julia Weiler, developmental psychologists focus on studying and discovering the specific developmental timeframe in which infants and young children experience the attainment of cognitive, physical, social, and physiological skills and changes. Specifically, the developmental psychologists conduct investigative studies concerning at which stage of cognitive and emotional development young children can develop the cognitive skill of facial perception. According to neuropsychologist Professor Dr. Sarah Weigelt, the task of identifying at which stage in development individuals fully posses the ability to perceive and recognize faces cannot be answered by stating a specific age, for the ability of facial perception develops gradually throughout an individuals’ lifetime. Due to the fact that facial perception and recognition is not an all or nothing developmental process, Dr. ...

Have you ever faced an incident where you catch yourself feeling as if this new experience of yours appears to be fairly familiar to you? Feeling as if you predicted your exact experience would happen just as it is happening? Déjà vu, translated from French as “already seen”, is the feeling of having already experienced something that is actually happening for the first time. A person may feel as if they remember scenes, events, or hearing something although they haven’t. According to researchers at Texas A&M University, about 60 to 80 percent of people have experienced this phenomenon. There appears to be no clear understanding of what stimulus elicits an experience of déjà vu. Researchers believe that this phenomenon may have something to do with how memory is stored in the brain. In class we learned that memories are not stored in a single area; they are temporarily stored in the hippocampal formation and over time are transferred to cortical areas. Long-term memories a...

As of February of 2014, new evidence came out saying that the basic emotions of the human being can be broken down into, not six, but four basic emotions. At least, that’s what the header of the article claimed. Here’s a link to the article I’ll be referring to: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-26019586 . In physiological psychology, one of my favorite lectures had to be the one on emotions. For the longest time, it has been suggested that human behavior can be explained by six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Research performed by Gaslow University at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology has performed studies to see if this is still true. After examining different facial expressions with new and improved software, researchers found that fear and surprise share similar expressions, including wide-open eyes and that anger and disgust share the same feature of a wrinkled nose. While happiness and sadness continued to show...

My interest in this topic began with a YouTube video: ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvjYcLY_cvY). To summarize, the YouTuber is a vegan who advocates for her diet of choice and tries to turn others onto her vegan lifestyle. In one of her videos, she discussed the diet of a fellow YouTuber and called her out on her eating style. The fellow YouTuber claimed that she sometimes eats out of boredom, which resulted in her eating unhealthier and how she was trying to change that. The vegan argued that eating out of boredom was not a real phenomenon. She argued that if she was eating, she was obviously hungry and her body was craving food to give energy to the brain. That argument confused me… I scratched my head as I listened to her rant about it. Bored eating isn’t a thing? Well, how come I eat out of boredom all the time, regardless if I’ve just eaten a five course dinner or not? People overeat all of the time. It didn’t make sense to me, so I decided to look up and see if ther...