Ultradium Rhythm - 16m Flashcards
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A strength of research investigating ultradian rhythms is that it has practical applications in understanding age-related changes in sleep. The knowledge that growth hormone is produced Al during stage 4 of sleep (slow wave sleep) has been associated with sleep deficit in old age as research has found older people experience less stage 4 sleep. As a result of this research, medication and relaxation techniques have been developed to increase stage 4 sleep in older individuals and therefore, prevent some issues associated with old age such as reduced alertness.
Therefore, research investigating ultradian rhythms is an important part of applied psychology.
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In addition a further strength of research into ultradian rhythms is that it uses scientific methods.
This is because it is based on objective and empirical techniques such as EEGs to measure brain activity and controlled lab settings. These scientifically measure the activity of the brain throughout the five stages of sleep to identify the length of the rhythm and how many times the rhythm occurs throughout the duration of sleep whilst excluding extraneous variables that may affect sleep such noise and temperature. Thus, psychologists would argue that this increases the overall internal validity of research investigating ultradian rhythms, therefore, raising Psychology’s scientific status.
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However, the research may have low ecological validity. Research on ultradian rhythms is conducted in an artificial setting and so the sleep experienced by participants in these studies may not reflect their genuine sleep patterns due to the unfamiliar surroundings and because they are attached to electrodes. This may alter the length of the ultradian rhythm, making it difficult to generalise findings to explain how ultradian rhythms work in real life.
