SL - Pheromones and behaviour Flashcards
Butenandt (1959)
Aim ->
To identify the chemical responsible for sexual attraction in silk moths.
Method ->
He identified a measurable behaviour (wing fluttering) in the male and tried various solutions containing different chemicals released by the female to see which induced this behaviour.
Results ->
Careful analysis allowed him to isolate one particular chemical - bombykol. The final confirmation came when the chemical structure was worked out and artificial bombykol was manufactured. It had the same effect
Conclusion ->
Evaluation ->
✔
✔
❌
❌
Kirk-Smith and Booth (1980)
Aim ->
To investigate whether Boarmate is a pheromone
Method ->
KS & B used ‘Boarmate’ spray on a chair in a dentist’s waiting room. ‘Boarmate’ contains androstenone - a boar pheromone that is also found in men’s axillary sweat (sweat released for purposes other than cooling). They recorded who sat where relative to the ‘sweaty’ seat, using three different concentrations of the spray.
Results ->
Findings were that women tended to sit on or next to the sprayed seat significantly more frequently than they did on days when the seat hadn’t been sprayed. At the highest concentration, men were significantly less likely to sit on or next to the sprayed chair.
Conclusion ->
KS & B concluded that the spray did have an effect, but considered it likely to be due to learned associations with the smell rather than to an in-built biological response to the chemical
Evaluation ->
✔ Field experiment -> The setting was naturalistic but the IV (presence and concentration of pheromone spray) was under the researchers’ control. High ecological validity as we can have high trust in the participants behaviour as they were acting as they normally would.
✔ Practically no bias -> The receptionists didn’t know that they were involved in a study. Receptionists were asked to note down where everyone was sitting, every half hour throughout the day - didn’t know why they were doing it. This helps to reduce bias as the receptionists weren’t looking for any particular correlation.
❌ Ethical issue -> Participants were unaware that they were in the study. This raises issues of informed consent and deception as participants did not give consent to be part of the study.
❌
Doucet
Aim ->
To see if there is something specific about the areolar secretions of lactating women that elicits behaviours from newborn infants that might affect milk transfer.
Method ->
Researchers presented eight different substances beneath the noses of newborn infants (they were each, on average, three days old). Those substances were:
Secretions from the areolar glands of a non-familiar woman other than the child’s mother, distilled water, sebum (secretions from a non-familiar woman), human milk from a non-familiar woman, cow’s milk, non-familiar formula milk, vanilla, and the milk the infant was currently feeding on.
Babies’ responses were recorded: lip-pursing; tongue protrusion; heart rate; respiration rate; depth of respirations.
Results ->
The babies responded more quickly and more strongly to the areolar gland secretion (AG odour) than to any other substance. They continued with the behavioural responses longer for AG odour than for any substance other than sebum or cow’s milk.
Conclusion ->
Only newborn infants (shown by their responses) can detect AG odour (adults could not discriminate between the substances that had been presented to the babies).
The response was (arguably) species-specific, as the babies didn’t respond in the same way to non-human milk or to formula milk. The babies’ responses cannot be explained by their early experiences of feeding and learned associations because there was no significant difference in the way that breast-fed and bottle-fed babies responded.
Evaluation ->
✔ The DVs (encoding and retrieval) were clearly operationalised and allowed for simple analyses of the effects of the different substances on the babies’ responses.
✔
❌ Low generalisability -> Only sixteen ppts were used so these results cannot be applied to everyone.
❌
