Physiological Psychology/psychopharmacology Flashcards
Memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease has most consistently been linked to which of the following neurotransmitters?
a. epinephrine
b. norepinephrine
c. serotonin
d. acetylcholine
d. Acetylcholine has been implicated in memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Specifically, degeneration of cholinergic neurons in the entorhinal cortex (which communicates directly with the hippocampus) has been linked to this disorder.
Hydrocephalus involves which of the following brain structures?
a. cerebellum
b. brain stem
c. substantia nigra
d. cerebral ventricles
d. Hydrocephalus (“water head”) is caused by a build-up of cerebrospinal fluid in the cerebral ventricles
The all-or-none principle applies to which of the following?
a. neurotransmitter re-uptake
b. action potential
c. neurogenesis
d. synaptogenesis
b. The all-or-none principle states that the magnitude of an action potential is independent of the intensity of the stimulation that produced it.
Which of the following is most likely to be useful for treating Obsessive-compulsive disorder?
a. a drug that blocks the reuptake of serotonin
b. a drug that increases cholinergic activity
c. a drug that blocks the release of GABA
d. a drug that increases the availability of cortisol
a. The SSRI’s, which block the reuptake of serotonin at nerve synapses have been found useful for alleviating the symptoms of OCD
The creation of new neurons is referred to as neurogenesis and, in the human brain, has been observed in the _____________ and _________________.
hippocampus; caudate nucleus
An electrical impulse that travels quickly through the cell
action potential
Chemical substances that transmit signals from one neuron to another.
Neurotransmitters
This neurotransmitter is found throughout the peripheral and central nervous systems and causes muscles to contract. Also involved in the REM sleep, the regulation of the sleep-wake cycle, and learning and memory.
Acetylcholine (ACh)
Which neurotransmitter is believed to underlie the memory deficits associated with Alzheimer’s disease?
Acetylcholine (more specifically, degeneration of cholinergic cells in the entorhinal cortex and other areas that communicate directly with the hippocampus)
Which neurotransmitters are involved in a number of funcitons including personality, mood, memory, and sleep?
Catecholamines (dopamine, norepinephrine, epinephrine)
Dopamine is involved in the regulation of movement and has been linked to several disorders with prominent motor symptoms including ________________ and _________________.
Tourette’s disorder; Parkinson’s disease
______________ plays an important role in mood, attention, dreaming, learning, and certain autonomic fuunctions. With regard to mood, the ____________________ hypothesis predicts that some forms of depression are due to lowerr-than-normal levels of this neurotransmitter.
Norepinephrine; catecholamine
____________________ usually exerts an inhibitory effect and has been implicated in mood, hunger, temperature regulation, sexual activity, arousal, sleep, aggression, and migraine headache.
Serotonin
Elevated levels of Serotonin contribute to _______________, Autistic Disorder, and _____________ related to Anorexia Nervosa, while low levels play a role in _____________, _____________, suicide, Bulimia nervosa, PTSD, and __________.
Schizophrenia, food restriction; aggression, depression, OCD.
___________ is an inhibitory neurotransmitter and plays a role in eating, seizure, and anxiety disorders, motor control, vision, and sleep.
GABA Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid
Evidence for the role of GABA in motor control is provided by studies showing that degeneration of cells that secrete GABA in the _________________ contributes to the motor symptoms of ______________________.
basal ganglia; Huntington’s disease
_______________ acts as an excitatory neurotransmitter in many areas of the brain. It plays a role in learning and memory and, more specifically, in long-term potentiation.
Glutamate
Excessive ___________ receptor activity (aka excitoxicity) can lead to seizures and may contribute to stroke-related brain damage, Huntington’s diseas, Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
glutamate
_________________ are inhibitory neuromodulators that lower the sensitivity of postsynaptic neurons to neurotransmitters. They have analgesic properties and may be responsible for the pain relief produced by acupuncture.
Endorphins
The _____________ have been implicated in certain pleasurable experiences (the runner’s high), emotions, memory and learning, and sexual behavior.
Endorphins
________________ is caused by an obstruction of the flow of cerebrospinal fluid that leads to build up of fluid and enlargement of the ventricles.
Hydrocephalus
The autonomic nervous system is divided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches. The _______________ branch is associated with arousal and expenditure of energy. The _________________ branch is involved in the conservation of energy and is active during digestion and periods of rest and relaxation.
sympathetic; parasympathetic
Computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide information on the ___________ of the brain, while ________, SPECT, and fMRI provide information on the brain’s ____________ activities.
structure; PET; functional
Damage to the cerebellum can produce _________, a condition involving slurred speech, severe tremors, and a loss of balance.
ataxia
Damage to the _________________ disrupts the sleep-wake cycle and can produce a permanent coma-like state of sleep.
reticular formation
The ______________ consists of three forebrain structures - the caudate nucleus, putamen, globus pallidus, and the substantia nigra. It is involved in planning, organizing, and coordinating voluntary movement and regulating the amplitude and direction of motor actions. They also play a role in sensorimotor learning and in stereotyped, species-specific motoric expressions of emotional states.
Basal ganglia
This syndrome is based on a study that found that bilateral lesions in the amygdala and temporal lobes of primates substantially reduce fear and aggression, increase docility and compulsive oral exploratory behaviors, alter dietary habits, and produce hypersexuality and psychic blindness (an inability to recognize the significance or meaning of events or objects).
Kluver-Bucy syndrome
For most sensory and motor functions, the cortex exhibits ________________________, which means that the left hemisphere controls the functions of the right side of the body and vice versa. One exception to this general rule is _____________. In addition, visual information from each eye goes to both sides of the brain, with information from the _________ visual field of each eye going to the left hemisphere and information from the ________ visual field of each eye going to the right hemisphere.
contralateral representation; olfaction; right; left
This is characterized by difficulties in producing spoken and written language
Broca’s (expressive) aphasia
Occurs from damage to the parietal lobe and is the inability to perform skilled motor movements in the absence off impaired motor functioning.
Apraxia
Inability to recognize familiar objects by touch due to damage to the parietal lobe
tactile agnosia
Failure too recognize parts of one’s own body due to damage in the parietal lobe.
asomatognosia
The inability to recognize one’s own neurological symptoms or other disorder caused by damage to the parietal lobe.
anosognosia
Lesions in the right parietal lobe can cause ______________________ (loss of knowledge about or interest in the left side of the body); while lesions in the left parietal lobe can produce _______________ (inability to carry out a sequence of actions), ________________ (inability to carry out a simple action in response to a command), or ___________, which involves a combination of finger agnosia, right-left confusion, agraphia, and acalculia.
contralateral neglect; ideational apraxia; ideomotor apraxia; Gerstmann’s syndromee
Lesions in this part of the temporal lobe produce ____________________, which is characterized by severe deficits in language comprehension and abnormalities in language production.
Wernicke’s area; Wernick’s (receptive) aphasia
An inability to recognize familiar faces
Prosopagnosia
_________________ occurs when a person is unable to perceive objects despite intact visual acuity, while ________________ occurs when a person is unable to recognize an object that he/she is focusing on as the result of impaired memory or inability to access relevant semantic knowledge.
Apperceptive visual agnosia; associative visual agnosia
The inherited form of color blindness is usually caused by a gene on the ____ chromosome, which means that _________ are more prone to color blindness than are _________. For a female to be color blind, she must inherit the trait from ____________, while a male is vulnerable when his __________ is either color blind or carries the color-blind trait.
X; males; females
According to this theory, the nervous system can process only a limited amount of sensory information at any one time.
Gate-control theory
This is a rare condition in which the stimulation of one sensory modality triggers a sensation in another sensory modality. For example, a person might hear a color or taste a shape.
Synesthesia
According to __________, the more intense the stimulus, the greater the increase in stimulus intensity required for the increase to produce a just noticeable difference. It predicts, for instance, that, if one gram must be added to ten grams for an increase in weight to be detected, then ten grams would have to be added to 100 grams for an increase to be perceived.
Weber’s law
____________ states that physical stimulus changes are logarithmically related to their psychological sensations. In other words, a person’s experience of stimulus intensity increases arithmetically as the stimulus intensity increases geometrically.
Fechner’s law
_____________ works well for extreme stimulus intensities and makes it possible to predict, for instance, that doubling the intensity of a light less than doubles the sensation of the light’s brightness, while doubling the intensity of an electric shock more than doubles the physical sensation.
Stevens’s Power Law
Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area are connected by the arcuate fasciculus, and damage to this structure can produce ________________, which does not significantly affect language comprehension but does result in anomia, paraphasia, and impaired repetition.
conduction aphasia
________________ aphasia is caused by lesions that isolate Broca’s area and/or Wernick’s area from other regions of the brain, while ___________ aphasia is caused by widespread brain injury involving Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas as well as other areas in the left frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes.
Transcortical; global
This theory of emotion stresses the importance of peripheral factors and proposes that emotions represent perceptions of bodily reactions to sensory stimuli. In other words, “you are afraid because your knees are shaking and your heart is pounding.”
James-Lange Theory
This theory of emotion places greater emphasis on the brain mechanisms that mediate emotion. It proposes that emotional and bodily reactions to stimuli occur simultaneously as a result of thalamic stimulation of the cortex and the peripheral nervous system.
Cannon-Bard Theory
This theory of emotion describes subjective emotional experience as the consequence of a combination of physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation of that arousal and the environmental context in which it occurs.
Schachter and Singer’s two-factor theory
This theory of emotion proposes that emotions are universal but that there are differences in how emotion-arousing events are interpreted or appraised.
Lazarus’s cognitive appraisal theory
The research has confirmed that the human brain is _____________________, which means that there are sex-related differences in its physical appearance.
sexually dimorphic
