Behavioral neuroscience
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Behavioral neuroscience, also known as biological psychology[1], biopsychology, or psychobiology[2] is the application of the principles of biology, in particular neurobiology, to the study of mental processes and behavior in human and non-human animals. A psychobiologist, for instance, may compare the unfamiliar imprinting behavior in goslings to the early attachment behavior in human infants and construct theory around these two phenomena. Behavioral Neuroscientists may often be interested in measuring some biological variable, e.g. an anatomical, physiological, or genetic variable, in an attempt to relate it quantitatively or qualitatively to a psychological or behavioral variable, and thus contribute to evidence based practice.
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History
The study of behavioral neuroscience dates back to Avicenna (980-1037), a Persian psychologist and physician who in The Canon of Medicine, recognized physiological psychology in the treatment of illnesses involving emotions, and developed a system for associating changes in the pulse rate with inner feelings, which is seen as an anticipation of the word association test.[3] Avicenna also gave psychological explanations for certain somatic illnesses, and he always linked the physical and psychological illnesses together. He explained that humidity inside the head can contribute to mood disorders, and he recognized that this occurs when the amount of breath changes: happiness increases the breath, which leads to increased moisture inside the brain, but if this moisture goes beyond its limits, the brain would lose control over its rationality and lead to mental disorders.[4]
Behavioral neuroscience as a scientific discipline later emerged from a variety of scientific and philosophical traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In philosophy, men like Rene Descartes proposed physical models to explain animal and human behavior. Descartes, for example, suggested that the pineal gland, a midline unpaired structure in the brain of many organisms, was the point of contact between mind and body. Descartes also elaborated on a theory in which the pneumatics of bodily fluids could explain reflexes and other motor behavior. This theory was inspired by moving statues in a garden in Paris.[5]
Other philosophers also helped give birth to psychology. One of the earliest textbooks in the new field, The Principles of Psychology by William James (1890), argues that the scientific study of psychology should be grounded in an understanding of biology:
| “ | Bodily experiences, therefore, and more particularly brain-experiences, must take a place amongst those conditions of the mental life of which Psychology need take account. The spiritualist and the associationist must both be 'cerebralists,' to the extent at least of admitting that certain peculiarities in the way of working of their own favorite principles are explicable only by the fact that the brain laws are a codeterminant of their result.
Our first conclusion, then, is that a certain amount of brain-physiology must be presupposed or included in Psychology.[6] |
” |
James, like many early psychologists, had considerable training in physiology. The emergence of both psychology and behavioral neuroscience as legitimate sciences can be traced from the emergence of physiology from anatomy, particularly neuroanatomy. Physiologists conducted experiments on living organisms, a practice that was distrusted by the dominant anatomists of the 18th and 19th centuries.[7] The influential work of Claude Bernard, Charles Bell, and William Harvey helped to convince the scientific community that reliable data could be obtained from living subjects.
The term "psychobiology" has been used in a variety of contexts, but was likely first used in its modern sense by Knight Dunlap in his book An Outline of Psychobiology (1914).[8] Dunlap also founded the journal Psychobiology. In the announcement of that journal, Dunlap writes that the journal will publish research "...bearing on the interconnection of mental and physiological functions", which describes the field of behavioral neuroscience even in its modern sense.[8]
Relationship to other fields of psychology and biology
In many cases, humans may serve as experimental subjects in behavioral neuroscience experiments; however, a great deal of the experimental literature in behavioral neuroscience comes from the study of non-human species, most frequently rats, mice, and monkeys. As a result, a critical assumption in behavioral neuroscience is that organisms share biological and behavioral similarities, enough to permit extrapolations across species. This allies behavioral neuroscience closely with comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology. Behavioral neuroscience also has paradigmatic and methodological similarities to neuropsychology, which relies heavily on the study of the behavior of humans with nervous system dysfunction (i.e., a non-experimentally based biological manipulation).
Synonyms for behavioral neuroscience include biopsychology, behavioral neuroscience, and psychobiology [9]. Physiological psychology is another term often used synonymously with behavioral neuroscience, though some authors would make physiological psychology a subfield of behavioral neuroscience, with an appropriately more narrow definition.
Research methods
The distinguishing characteristic of a behavioral neuroscience experiment is that either the independent variable of the experiment is biological, or some dependent variable is biological. In other words, the nervous system of the organism under study is permanently or temporarily altered, or some aspect of the nervous system is measured (usually to be related to a behavioral variable).
Disabling or decreasing neural function
- Lesions - A classic method in which a brain-region of interest is destroyed or stimulated to observe any resulting changes such as degradated or enhanced performance on some behavioral measure. Lesions can be placed with relatively high accuracy thanks to a variety of brain 'atlases' which provide a map of brain regions in 3-dimensional stereotactic coordinates.
- Electrolytic lesions - Neural tissue is destroyed through the application of electrical shock trauma.
- Chemical lesions - Neural tissue is destroyed by the infusion of a neurotoxin.
- Temporary lesions - Neural tissue is temporarily disabled by cooling or by the use of anesthetics such as tetrodotoxin.
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation - A new technique usually used with human subjects in which a magnetic coil applied to the scalp causes unsystematic electrical activity in nearby cortical neurons which can be experimentally analyzed as a functional lesion.
- Psychopharmacological manipulations - A chemical receptor antagonist induces neural activity by interfering with neurotransmission. Antagonists can be delivered systemically (such as by intravenous injection) or locally (intracebrally) during a surgical procedure.
Enhancing neural function
- Electrical Stimulation - A classic method in which neural activity is enhanced by application of a small electrical current (too small to cause significant cell death).
- Psychopharmacological manipulations - A chemical receptor agonist facilitates neural activity by enhancing or replacing endogenous neurotransmitters. Agonists can be delivered systemically (such as by intravenous injection) or locally (intracerebrally) during a surgical procedure.
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation - In some cases (for example, studies of motor cortex), this technique can be analyzed as having a stimulatory effect (rather than as a functional lesion) .
Measuring neural activity
- Single-unit recording - A method whereby an electrode introduced into the brain of a living animal to detect electrical activity that is generated by the neurons adjacent to the electrode tip. Normally this is performed with sedated animals but sometimes it is performed on awake animals engaged in a behavioral event. Such as a thirsty rat whisking a particular sandpaper grade previously paired with water order to measure the corresponding patterns of neuronal firing at the decision point.[10]
- Multielectrode recording - The use of a bundle of fine electrodes to record the simultaneous activity of up to hundreds of neurons.
- fMRI - Functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique most frequently applied on human subjects, in which changes in cerebral blood flow can be detected in an MRI apparatus and are taken to indicate relative activity of larger scale brain regions (i.e., on the order of hundreds of thousands of neurons).
- Electroencephalography - Or EEG; and the derivative technique of event-related potentials, in which scalp electrodes monitor the average activity of neurons in the cortex (again, used most frequently with human subjects).
- Functional neuroanatomy - A more complex counterpart of phrenology. The expression of some anatomical marker is taken to reflect neural activity. For example, the expression of immediate early genes is thought to be caused by vigorous neural activity. Likewise, the injection of 2-deoxyglucose prior to some behavioral task can be followed by anatomical localization of that chemical; it is taken up by neurons that are electrically active.
Genetic manipulations
- QTL mapping - The influence of a gene in some behavior can be statistically inferred by studying inbred strains of some species, most commonly mice. The recent sequencing of the genome of many species, most notably mice, has facilitated this technique.
- Selective breeding - Organisms, often mice, may be bred selectively among inbred strains to create a recombinant congenic strain. This might be done to isolate an experimentally interesting stretch of DNA derived from one strain on the background genome of another strain to allow stronger inferences about the role of that stretch of DNA.
- Genetic engineering - The genome may also be experimentally-manipulated; for example, knockout mice can be engineered to lack a particular gene, or a gene may be expressed in a strain which does not normally do so (the 'knock in'). Advanced techniques may also permit the expression or suppression of a gene to occur by injection of some regulating chemical.
Topic areas in behavioral neuroscience
In general, behavioral neuroscientists study similar themes and issues as academic psychologists, though limited by the need to use nonhuman animals. As a result, the bulk of literature in behavioral neuroscience deals with mental processes and behaviors that are shared across different animal models such as:
- Sensation and perception
- Motivated behavior (hunger, thirst, sex)
- Control of movement
- Learning and memory
- Sleep and biological rhythms
- Emotion
However, with increasing technical sophistication and with the development of more precise noninvasive methods that can be applied to human subjects, behavioral neuroscientists are beginning to contribute to other classical topic areas of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, such as:
- Language
- Reasoning and decision making
- Consciousness
Behavioral neuroscience has also had a strong history of contributing to the understanding of medical disorders, including those that fall under the purview of clinical psychology and biological psychopathology (also known as abnormal psychology). Although animal models for all mental illnesses do not exist, the field has contributed important therapeutic data on a variety of conditions, including:
- Parkinson's Disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that often impairs the sufferer's motor skills and speech.
- Huntington's Disease, a rare inherited neurological disorder whose most obvious symptoms are abnormal body movements and a lack of coordination. It also affects a number of mental abilities and some aspects of personality.
- Alzheimer's Disease, a neurodegenerative disease that, in its most common form, is found in people over the age of 65 and is characterized by progressive cognitive deterioration, together with declining activities of daily living and by neuropsychiatric symptoms or behavioral changes.
- Clinical depression, a common psychiatric disorder, characterized by a persistent lowering of mood, loss of interest in usual activities and diminished ability to experience pleasure.
- Schizophrenia, a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental illness characterized by impairments in the perception or expression of reality, most commonly manifesting as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction.
- Autism, a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old.
- Anxiety, a physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components. These components combine to create the feelings that are typically recognized as fear, apprehension, or worry.
- Drug abuse, including alcoholism
Nobel Laureates
The following Nobel Prize winners could reasonably be considered biological psychologists. (This list omits winners who were almost exclusively neuroanatomists or neurophysiologists; i.e., those that did not measure behavioral or psychological variables.)
- Charles Sherrington (1932)
- Edgar Adrian (1932)
- Walter Hess (1949)
- Egas Moniz (1949)
- Georg von Bekesy (1961)
- George Wald (1967)
- Ragnar Granit (1967)
- Konrad Lorenz (1973)
- Niko Tinbergen (1973)
- Karl von Frisch (1973)
- Roger W. Sperry (1981)
- David H. Hubel (1981)
- Torsten N. Wiesel (1981)
- Eric R. Kandel (2000)
- Arvid Carlsson (2000)
- Richard Axel (2004)
- Linda B. Buck (2004)
See also
- Neurobiology
- Behavioral neuroscience
- Biological psychiatry
- Biology
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Developmental psychobiology
- Evolutionary psychology
- Psychopharmacology
- Social neuroscience
- Models of abnormality
References
- ^ Rosenzweig, Breedlove, Watson; Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, 4/e, p. 3
- ^ Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary » Psychobiology>
- ^ Ibrahim B. Syed PhD, "Islamic Medicine: 1000 years ahead of its times", Journal of the International Society for the History of Islamic Medicine, 2002 (2): 2-9 [7]
- ^ Amber Haque (2004), "Psychology from Islamic Perspective: Contributions of Early Muslim Scholars and Challenges to Contemporary Muslim Psychologists", Journal of Religion and Health 43 (4): 357-377 [366].
- ^ Carlson, Neil (2007). Physiology of Behavior (9th Ed.). Allyn and Bacon. pp. 11–14. ISBN 0-205-46724-5.
- ^ James, William (1950/1890). The Principles of Psychology, Vol. One. Dover Publications, Inc.. pp. 4–5. ISBN 0-486-20381-6.
- ^ Shepherd, Gordon M. (1991). Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-506491-7.
- ^ a b Dewsbury, Donald (1991). ""Psychobiology"". American Psychologist (46): 198–205.
- ^ S. Marc Breedlove, Mark Rosenzweig and Neil V. Watson (2007). Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience. Sinauer Associates. ISBN 978-0878937059
- ^ von Heimendahl, M., Itskov, P., Arabzadeh, E., & Diamond, M. (2007). Neuronal activity in rat barrel cortex underlying texture discrimination. PLoS Biol, 5(11), e305.
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Outline of psychology
Additional info - part 2
Anxiety
Anxiety is a psychological and physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components.[2] These components combine to create an unpleasant feeling that is typically associated with uneasiness, fear, or worry.Arthur L. Benton
Arthur Lester Benton (October 16, 1909 – December 27, 2006) was a neuropsychologist and Emeritus Professor of Neurology and Psychology at the University of Iowa.Arvid Carlsson
Arvid Carlsson (born 25 January 1923) is a Swedish scientist who is best known for his work with the neurotransmitter dopamine and its effects in Parkinson's disease. For his work on dopamine, Carlsson won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000,[1] along with co-recipients Eric Kandel and Paul Greengard.Attention
Attention is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Attention has also been referred to as the allocation of processing resources [1]Autism
Autism is a disorder of neural development that is characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old.[1] Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood.[2] The two other autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are Asperger syndrome, which lacks delays in cognitive development and language, and PDD-NOS, diagnosed when full criteria for the other two disorders are not met.[3]Avicenna
Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā', known as Abū Alī Sīnā[4][5] (Persian: ابوعلی سینا) or, more commonly, Ibn Sīnā[6] (Arabic: ابن سینا), and commonly known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna (Greek: Aβιτζιανός, Abitzianos),[7] (c. 980 - 1037) was a Persian[8] polymath and the foremost physician and philosopher of his time.[9] He was also an astronomer, chemist, geologist, logician, paleontologist, mathematician, physicist, poet, psychologist, scientist and teacher. [10]B. F. Skinner
Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform,[1][2] and poet.[3] He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.[4] He invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism,[5] and founded his own school of experimental research psychology—the experimental analysis of behavior. His analysis of human behavior culminated in his work Verbal Behavior, which has recently seen enormous increase in interest experimentally and in applied settings.[6] He discovered and advanced the rate of response as a dependent variable in psychological research. He invented the cumulative recorder to measure rate of responding as part of his highly influential work on schedules of reinforcement.[7][8] In a recent survey, Skinner was listed as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.[9] He was a prolific author who published 21 books and 180 articles.[10][11]Bender-Gestalt Test
The Bender Visual Motor Gestalt Test, or simply the Bender-Gestalt test, is a psychological test first developed by child neuropsychiatrist Lauretta Bender. The test is used to evaluate "visual-motor maturity", to screen for developmental disorders, or to assess neurological function or brain damage.Benton Visual Retention Test
The Benton Visual Retention Test (or simply Benton Test) is an individually administered test for ages 8-adult that measures visual perception and visual memory . It can also be used to help identify possible learning disabilities. The child is shown 10 designs, one at a time, and asked to reproduce each one as exactly as possible on plain paper from memory. The test is untimed, and the results are professionally scored by form, shape, pattern, and arrangement on the paper.Biological psychiatry
Biological psychiatry, or biopsychiatry is an approach to psychiatry that aims to understand mental disorder in terms of the biological function of the nervous system. It is interdisciplinary in its approach and draws on sciences such as neuroscience, psychopharmacology, biochemistry, genetics and physiology to investigate the biological bases of behaviour and psychopathology. Biopsychiatry is that branch/speciality of medicine,which deals with the study of biological function of the nervous system in mental disorders.Biological psychopathology
Biological psychopathology is the study of the biological basis of mental illness. It attempts to elucidate the genetic and neurological etiology behind psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, mood disorders, and anxiety disorders.Biology
Biology (from Greek βιολογία - βίος, bios, "life"; -λογία, -logia, study of) is the natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.[1] The term biology in its modern sense appears to have been introduced independently by Karl Friedrich Burdach (1800), Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus (Biologie oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, 1802), and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Hydrogéologie, 1802).[2][3]Breath
Breathing is the process that takes oxygen in and carbon dioxide out of the body. Aerobic organisms require oxygen to release energy via respiration, in the form of the metabolism of energy-rich molecules such as glucose. The medical term for normal relaxed breathing is eupnea.Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung (German pronunciation: [ˈkaːɐ̯l ˈgʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology (also known as Jungian psychology). Jung's approach to psychology has been influential in the field of depth psychology and in countercultural movements across the globe. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is "by nature religious" and to explore it in depth.[1] He emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, religion and philosophy. Though not the first to analyze dreams, he has become perhaps the most well known pioneer in the field of dream analysis. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts.Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and was honored for his pioneering research with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1956. The person-centered approach, his own unique approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains such as psychotherapy and counseling (client-centered therapy), education (student-centered learning), organizations, and other group settings. For his professional work he was bestowed the Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Psychology by the APA in 1972. Towards the end of his life Carl Rogers was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with national intergroup conflict in South Africa and Northern Ireland.[1] In an empirical study by Haggbloom et al. (2002) using six criteria such as citations and recognition, Rogers was found to be the sixth most eminent psychologist of the 20th century and second, among clinicians, only to Sigmund Freud.[2]Charles Bell
Sir Charles Bell (Born November 1774, in Doun in Monteath, Edinburgh - Died 28 April 1842[1], in North Hallow, Worcestershire) was a Scottish anatomist, surgeon, physiologist and natural theologian. He was the younger brother of John Bell (1763-1820), also a noted surgeon and writer.Charles Sherrington
Sir Charles Scott Sherrington OM, GBE, PRS (27 November 1857 - 4 March 1952) was an English neurophysiologist, histologist, bacteriologist, and a pathologist, Nobel laureate and president of the Royal Society in the early 1920s. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edgar Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian in 1932.Clark L. Hull
Clark Leonard Hull (1884 - 1952) was an influential American psychologist who sought to explain learning and motivation by scientific laws of behavior. Born in Akron, New York, Hull obtained bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Michigan, and in 1918 a PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he also taught from 1916 to 1929. His doctoral research on "Quantitative Aspects of the Evolution of Concepts" was published in Psychological Monographs.Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard (July 12, 1813 – February 10, 1878) was a French physiologist. Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science".[1] Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of blind experiments to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations.[2]Clinical depression
Major depressive disorder (also known as clinical depression, major depression, unipolar depression, or unipolar disorder) is a mental disorder characterized by an all-encompassing low mood accompanied by low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities. The term "major depressive disorder" was selected by the American Psychiatric Association to designate this symptom cluster as a mood disorder in the 1980 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) classification, and has become widely used since. The general term depression is often used to describe the disorder, but as it can also be used to describe other types of psychological depression, more precise terminology is preferred for the disorder in clinical and research use. Major depression is a disabling condition which adversely affects a person's family, work or school life, sleeping and eating habits, and general health. In the United States, approximately 3.4% of people with major depression commit suicide, and up to 60% of people who commit suicide have depression or another mood disorder.Comparative psychology
Comparative psychology usually refers to the study of the behavior and mental life of animals other than human beings. However, psychologists and scientists do not always agree on this definition. Comparative psychology has also been described as branch of psychology in which emphasis is placed on cross-species comparisons–including human-to-animal comparisons. Some researchers however, feel that direct comparisons should not be the sole focus of comparative psychology and that intense focus on a single organism to understand its behavior is just as desirable, if not more. Donald Dewsbury reviews the works of several psychologists and their definitions and concludes that the object of comparative psychology is to establish principles of generality focusing on both proximate and ultimate causation[1]. It has been suggested that the term itself be discarded since it fails to be descriptive of the field but no appropriate replacement has been found. If looking for a precise definition, one may define comparative psychology as psychology concerned with the evolution (phylogenetic history and adaptive significance) and development (ontogenetic history and mechanism) of behavior [2].Consciousness
Consciousness is subjective experience or awareness or wakefulness or the executive control system of the mind.[1] It is an umbrella term that may refer to a variety of mental phenomena. [2] Although humans realize what everyday experiences are, consciousness refuses to be defined, philosophers note (e.g. John Searle in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy):[3]Continuous Performance Task
A Continuous Performance Task/Test, or CPT, is a psychological test which measures a person's sustained and selective attention and impulsivity. Sustained attention is the ability to maintain a consistent focus on some continuous activity or stimuli, and is associated with impulsivity. Selective attention is the ability to focus on relevant stimuli and ignore competing stimuli. This skill is associated with distractibility.[1]Counseling psychology
Counseling psychology is a psychological specialty that encompasses research and applied work in several broad domains: counseling process and outcome; supervision and training; career development and counseling; and prevention and health. Some unifying themes among counseling psychologists include a focus on assets and strengths, person-environment interactions, educational and career development, brief interactions, and a focus on intact personalities[1]. In the United States, the premier scholarly journals of the profession are the Journal of Counseling Psychology [2] and The Counseling Psychologist[3].DNA
Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses. The main role of DNA molecules is the long-term storage of information. DNA is often compared to a set of blueprints or a recipe, or a code, since it contains the instructions needed to construct other components of cells, such as proteins and RNA molecules. The DNA segments that carry this genetic information are called genes, but other DNA sequences have structural purposes, or are involved in regulating the use of this genetic information.David H. Hubel
David Hunter Hubel (born February 27, 1926) was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres. In 1978, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University.