Neurologic or Psychiatric Disorder

Understanding the biological basis for a neurological condition provides the foundation upon which you can develop powerful questions and design experiments that support effective treatments. Given the prevalence of neurologic or psychiatric conditions in the population, development of strong treatments can lead to profound positive social change.

To prepare:

• Review and implement the feedback your Instructor provided for Part 1 of your paper.
• Conduct additional research on your topic in order to develop an appropriate research question and experiment related to your chosen condition.

By Day 7

Your paper should be 5-7 pages, including the portions submitted in Week 5. 

• Extend the sections of Part 1 as necessary based on the feedback from your Instructor.  
• For Part 2, develop a research question and propose an experiment related to the condition.
  • If your research question is quantitative, this should include a hypothesis about what answer you expect to your question and some basics of the experimental design, such as your methods and your experimental and control groups.
  • If your question is qualitative, identify a phenomenon of study, the population or context you intend to study, and your research question, which is typically open-ended and would begin “What…” or “How…”.

Please see the Final Paper Guidelines: Biologic Basis of Neurologic or Psychiatric Disorder in your Learning Resources for complete description.

required Readings

Breedlove, S. M., & Watson, N. V. (2019). Behavioral neuroscience (9th ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 

• Chapter 15, “Emotions, Aggression, and Stress”

Classifying subjective emotional stress response evoked by multitasking using EEG. (2017). 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 3036–3041. doi:10.1109/SMC.2017.8123091 

Goetz, S. M. M., & Weisfeld, G. E. (2013). Applying evolutionary thinking to the study of emotion. Behavioral Sciences, 3(3), 388–407. doi:10.3390/bs3030388

Lehmann, M. L., & Herkenham, M. (2011). Environmental enrichment confers stress resiliency to social defeat through an infralimbic cortex-dependent neuroanatomical pathway. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31(16), 6159–6173. Retrieved from http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/16/6159.full.pdf+html

Environmental enrichment confers stress resiliency to social defeat through an infralimbic cortex-dependent neuroanatomical pathway by Lehmann, M., & Herkenham, M., in The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 31/Issue 16. Copyright 2011 by Society for Neuroscience. Reprinted by permission of Society for Neuroscience via the Copyright Clearance Center.

van Oort, J., Tendolkar, I., Hermans, E. J., Mulders, P. C., Beckmann, C. F., Schene, A. H., … van Eijndhoven, P. F. (2017). How the brain connects in response to acute stress: A review at the human brain systems level. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 83, 281–297. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.10.015

National Institute of Mental Health. (2011). Stress-defeating effects of exercise traced to emotional brain circuit. doi:10.1037/e614672011-001