Download Theories and Empirical Studies of the Biological

Cody Lunsford
Gabriel Santacruz
Dylan Wise
Describe and evaluate theories and empirical
studies within the biological perspective.
Theories:
 Dualism
 Materialism
 Heredity
 Natural Selection
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Dualism theorizes that the mind is much more than just the brain.
This concept shows that our mind has a non-material, spiritual dimension that
includes consciousness and possibly an eternal attribute.
A way to understand this concept is to consider us as a container including
our physical body and physical brain along with a separate non-physical
mind, spirit, or soul.
An example would be picture and sound waves being expelled from a television.
The television is physical but the picture and sound waves are non-physical.
Ideas of dualism can be seen as far back as Plato and Aristotle and popularized by
Rene Descartes.
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The opposite of dualism which emphasizes that everything in the world
is physical and has no intellectual or spiritual form.
This concept compared to the body is that the mind, body, and brain are
one physical being.
Materialism developed first in India around 600 B.C.
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Hereditary is the concept that all our physical features, intelligence,
behavior, and sexual orientation is all in the genes and DNA.
Behavior genes is the source of constant debate.
There is a fear that if the concept of hereditary can be used to excuse
criminal charges and justify divorces.
Also there are many studies that are researching the existence of the
“gay gene.”
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The concept that traits become more or less common
among a species due to adaptation of survival and
reproduction of the recipients. This is the main
concept of evolution.
Theorized by Charles Darwin
An example would be the Peppered-Moth.
During the industrial revolution in Britain, the trees
surrounding factories were hit with soot and
blackened them. The moths were becoming more and
more black rather the lighter colored ones and could
hide and reproduce without the fear from predators.
Aka “Survival of the fittest”
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Darwin
Wernicke
Hoebel and Teiteobaum
Paul Broca
Sperry and Gazzangia
Dr. Thomas Bouchard
Noam Chomsky
Schacter and Singer
Including natural selection, Darwin also had a theory
of mate choice.
 Sexual selection is the theory proposed by Charles
Darwin that states that certain evolutionary traits can
be explained by intraspecific competition.
 Men compete and women choose.
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Theorized by Darwin
Emphasizes that there is a change of inherited
traits throughout populations of organism over
an extensive amount of generations.
The change can be adding or taking away
certain traits of a species.
Wernicke viewed that all mental illnesses were
caused by damage to the brain.
 His study to back this up was that in 1873, where
he studied a man with a stroke.
 The man could not understand words or read
words.
 After the man died, Wernicke performed a
autopsy to discover that the man had a lesion in
the rear temporal area of the left hemisphere.
 He concluded that that area was the functional
area for speech comprehension.
 This would be known as Wernicke’s aphasia.
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In the second volume of Textbook of Brain Disorders,
Wernicke described for the first time a syndrome
resulting from the ingestion of sulfuric acid, which
caused specific mental and motor abnormalities and
paralysis of muscles in the eyes.
 He called this syndrome acute hemorrhagic superior
polio encephalitis.
 It now is called Wernicke's encephalopathy and is
known to be caused by a nutritional thiamine
deficiency.
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Broca had two patients with a brain lesion.
They had lost the ability to speak after injury to the
posterior inferior frontal gyrus of the brain.
Since then, the approximate region he identified has
become known as Broca’s area, and the deficit in
language production as Broca’s aphasia.
Later studies using a MRI have revealed that in Broca’s
area is activated when undergoing various language
tasks.
Also, slow destruction of Broca’s area by tumors have
revealed that speech is intact which hypothesizes that the
function can shift areas.
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In 1966, Hoebel and Teitelbaum located a cut
to the ventromedial hypothalamus nucleus.
They split the rats cycle into two phases in
the study, dynamic and static.
During the dynamic phase, the rats ate 2x-3x
the normal amount of food.
During the static phase, no weight was
gained and food was regulated to keep the
weight until the end of the static phase.
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Sperry received the prize for his discoveries concerning the functional
specialization of the cerebral hemispheres with the help of his colleagues.
With the help of so called "split brain" patients, he carried out experiments.
Sperry, Gazzangia, and other colleagues for the first time in history had
knowledge about the left and right hemispheres.
The studies demonstrated that the left and right hemispheres are
specialized in different tasks.
The left side of the brain is specialized in taking care of the analytical and
verbal tasks. The left side speaks much better than the right side, while the
right half takes care of the space perception tasks and music, for example.
The right hemisphere is involved when you are making a map or giving
directions on how to get to your home from the bus station. The right
hemisphere can only produce rudimentary words and phrases, but
contributes emotional context to language.
Without the help from the right hemisphere, you would be able to read the
word "pig" but you wouldn't be able to imagine what it is.
Bouchard theorized that twins had huge similarities
not just physically but mentally and genetically.
 In 1979, Bouchard came across an account of a pair of
twins (Jim Springer and Jim Lewis) who had been
separated from birth and were reunited at age 39. The
twins were found to have married women named
Linda, divorced, and married the second time to
women named Betty. One named his son James Allan,
the other named his son James Alan, and both named
their pet dogs Toy.
 Bouchard concluded that even separated at birth,
twins had a connection from the same genes.
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Developed the theory of generative grammar or the process to
correctly predict the combination of words that will form
grammatical sentences.
Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are
both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to the exact
same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability
to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never
acquire either ability.
Chomsky labeled the relevant capacity the human has which the cat
lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD).
He also suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to
figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range
of possible human languages.
The universal features that would result from these constraints are
often termed "universal grammar."
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Schachter and Singer formed the SchachterSinger Theory of Emotion and is a widely
accepted social psychological theory of affective
experience.
It integrates the role of both physiological arousal
and cognitive factors in determining emotion.
The theory posits that the experience of particular
emotions is dependent on cognitive labels
exerting a “steering function” over general
physiological arousal.