The biological approach to children’s cognitive development is well-established, as it seems obvious that learning must be directly related to neurogenesis (growth of new synapses connecting neurons) and neural pruning (‘cutting back’ of synapses no longer needed). But of course this development through neuroplasticity requires not only good nutrition and nurturing to prevent injury, but also social stimulation, so a … Read More
Planning your course effectively – exploiting the overlaps
Here is some support when planning for the new school year. This is one of the most useful exercises I have ever done before teaching a course on psychology. Using a table, or a simple Venn diagram, as above, identify the overlaps between the core approaches and the options. Putting these posters around your class, sharing them with students, and … Read More
Ethics of animal research
A few months ago, we posted about how we could use animals for research. Today we are looking at the ethics surrounding the decision to conduct research using nonhuman animals. Most students can reel off the ethics involved in conducting research on humans (informed consent, lack of harm, right to withdraw, privacy, etc.) but when we talk about the ethics … Read More
Antagonists – what do they do?
Antagonists are any chemicals that fit into receptor sites on the post-synaptic neuron, inhibiting the neuron from firing. Well-known antagonists for serotonin, which we looked at in the previous blog post, are anti-psychotic drugs like Clozapine, which acts on the HT2A serotonin receptors to decrease the effects of serotonin in the brain. Many ant-psychotic drugs also act as antagonists for dopamine, … Read More
Agonists – what are they?
Biological psychology has come to the fore over the past years. The mapping of the human genome combined with improved brain-scanning techniques has meant that the biological correlation to psychological conditions is more easily identifiable, and it is clear that many mental disorders like major depressive disorder, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia are explainable through a gene x environment interaction. This … Read More
Child Poverty
Psychology comes right up to date with the study of the effects of child poverty on cognitive and social development. In Psychology Sorted we make the link between child poverty, brain imaging technology and child development. We could just as easily have also added in an abnormal psychology link to mental health, for as child poverty rates in the US and … Read More
We’re all just animals, aren’t we?
The question of when to use non-human animal studies as evidence for human behaviour is a tricky one. Because it remains unethical to lesion the brain of a live human to look for a correlation between brain damage and behaviour (at the moment!), animal studies are used in large numbers at the biological approach. However, many people are becoming more … Read More
Research from Psychology Sorted: Poverty and childhood cognitive development – a biological approach.
This is the first in a series of posts using research directly from our new book Psychology Sorted. The study we’re looking at today is Luby et al. (2013) on how children’s brain development and therefore their cognitive development are affected by poverty. The researchers found that exposure to poverty in early childhood impacts cognitive development by school age. However, the effect … Read More