Psychology from the Newspaper, Magazine, or the Internet (Research Paper Sample)

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Physiological psychology
The paper explores the function and involvement of brain regions and ventral striatum in both learning and anxiety during aversive contextual conditioning. The processes employ the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging in assessing the response of hemodynamic brain of one hundred and eighteen healthy people (McDougall & William 21). Concurrently gotten self-reports and skin conductance indicates favorable context conditioning. It is evident ventral striatum's hemodynamic responses predicts the CS+ (aversive event) in comparison to CS- that never pairs in the phase acquisition observation. Significant brain responses are also found in prefrontal cortex, insula, amygdala, medial, and hippocampus. The information suggests the underline role of ventral striatum during the conditioning of context fear and its involvement in the general processing of salient stimuli not only during process rewarding.
The last decades saw the extensive study of Pavlovian fear conditioning in humans as well as rodents as a great model of anxiety disorders. The initial stimulus results in paradigm phases of acquisition in becoming associate with an unconditional stimulus after various pairings hence eliciting fear responses just on its own. Meta-analysis proves that the level of blood oxygen dependent responds in the ventral striatum about the reward anticipation. The evocation of phasic fear responses result from conditioned cues as contexts lead to sustained anxiety responses. The study of anxiety disorders becomes possible due to the constitution of contextual fear conditioning like in the case of posttraumatic stress disorders (Milner & Peter 27). It is evident hippocampal activations results from contextual fear contrasting the several roles conditioning of ventral striatum (McDougall & William 27). There was an expectation that investigation of association, more so prediction striatal brain responses and verbal self-reports would correlate with arousal ratings and contingencies but not relating to balance. Research shows a strong relationship between activation in the hippocampus, contingencies awareness, and skin conductance responses. The final hypothesis is that ratings of contingencies might be correlated with hippocampal brain responses which in turn have a relationship with skin conductance responses.
The exploration of brain activity and verbal self-reports in the mPFC and insula was to give a positive correlation between skin conductance responses and activation during fear conditioning for the amygdala basing on initial findings. The study of brain activity and verbal self-report was about the participation of eighty-five males and sixty-six females, a total of one hundred of and fifty-one healthy persons. The study involved their recruits in predictors of posttraumatic of the context of longitudinal study with inclusive of persons from training institutions for rescue workers having heightened the risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorders (Milner & Peter 31). The results saw no clear evidence of traumatization of the people at the moment. The study saw an exclusion of people with current axis II or axis I mental disorder. The mental disorder includes substance abuse or dependence according to its determination by the structured clinical interview for the German version for both statistics and diagnostics manual of mental disorder – IV. The study locked out more than fifteen participants due to movement artifacts or technical problems during their measurements. The processes were about each and every participant receiving a series of three increasingly stimuli. The stimuli begin with a mild stimulus up to the point the member indicates it as pain threshold and continues up to the point of pain becoming tolerance or unbearable. Averaging of the values was done in trying to give out the best results.
Contextual fear conditioning employs the procedure of data imaging on a smaller subsample. The system consists of protocol conditioning of first habituation, both late and early extinction and acquisition (Milner & Peter 37). The study involves the use of two colors, mainly blue and orange in the presentation of various spa...