My chosen topic: “It is understandable when you experience worry and stress in certain situations, like preparing for and taking an exam, being in a car wreck, or moving to college. What has been harder to understand is why some people seem to continue to experience worry and stress after these events have occurred and no other life stressors are present. What has research in biopsychology taught us about the long-term effects of stress, including the structural and neurochemical changes to the brain that it may cause? How might these effects contribute to the experience of anxiety in the absence of a direct stressor? How would these changes impact the course of recovery from anxiety?”
I will attach my 3 compressed summary articles so you have an idea of what the articles are about. I will also attach the articles for you to read yourself.
The term paper project has been designed to meet several goals:
To improve your skills in identifying, locating, and evaluating biopsychological research articles,
To teach you how to read, understand, and think critically about biopsychological research reports and their implications for real word issues, and
To enhance your ability to develop clear, effective and scientifically-sound arguments in written forms of expression.
Your assignment is to write a paper that demonstrates how evidence from biopsychology has changed how we think about human behavior. In your paper, you must review at least three scientific studies that provide support for the argument you give. A critical component of this assignment is that you support your statements with scientific evidence. For each topic provided, I have identified one relevant scientific journal article (“Chronic Stress Induces Contrasting Patterns of DendriticRemodeling in Hippocampal and Amygdaloid Neurons”). Your major tasks are (a) to select two more scientific journal articles that use biopsychology methods ( I chose: “reduced hippocampal and amygdala volume as a mechanism underlying stress sensitization to depression following childhood trauma.” AND repeated social stress in rats leads to contrasting patterns of structural plasticity in the amygdala and hippocampus) (b) to write summaries of all three articles and turn them in for approval (ALREADY DONE, DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THIS STEP), (c) to turn in your rough draft and provide a peer review of one of your classmate’s rough draft (DO NOT WORRY ABOUT THIS EITHER), and (d) to write a 4 to 5 page paper based on the research you have reviewed. The entire term paper is worth 60 pts, which is 10% of your final grade. WORRY ABOUT LETTER D ONLY and the primary question in the beginning “Your assignment is to write a paper that demonstrates how evidence from biopsychology has changed how we think about human behavior. In your paper, you must review at least three scientific studies that provide support for the argument you give.”
THE ROUGH DRAFT INSTRUCTIONS:
Here are some writing tips:
Once you understand what was done in each study, what was found in each study, and how the results of the studies differ from each other or overlap, you are ready to write. Your goal is to answer the question for a particular topic using the 3 studies to support your points. Final papers are expected to be 3-4 pages in length.
Suggested Paper Structure:
Introduction: Begin the paper by introducing the issue at hand and explaining the basic concepts needed to be understood (e.g. what is stress, hemineglect, glossolalia, REM, social inclusion?). Begin by discussing what has commonly been thought about human behavior and how biopsychology might inform that thought, highlighting the real-world importance of the issues you are going to be talking about.
Body: The bulk of the paper should consist of your describing what the studies have found with regard to the issue. Your summary of the studies should generally follow the guidelines mentioned above. That is, you need to be sure to state what the researchers were interested in, what they did to test their hypotheses, what they found, and what their conclusions were. In addition, you can link your discussion of one study to the next by pointing out similarities (e.g., the findings of White (1998) are similar to those of Brown (1999)… then go on to discuss the White study), or discrepancies (e.g., although Brown (1999) found that most cows in New Jersey are black and white, White (1998) has shown that most cows in Kansas are brown and white…then go on to discuss the White study).
Summary or Synthesis: After having discussed the studies, compare, contrast, and summarize the findings across all of the studies. If there are discrepancies, offer suggestions as to why this difference exists. For example, is there some difference between the samples (subjects) used in the studies that may have influenced their outcomes? Or are there procedural differences? Interpretational differences?
Conclusions, Implications: Based on the evidence provided to you in the articles, what are your conclusions and generalizations about the issues at hand? What are the implications of these results for shaping current thinking about human behavior?
References: You need to have your three references listed at the end of your paper, using APA formatting. Any additional articles or books cited in the paper should also be in your reference list.
Some writing style and grammatical suggestions:
Be sure that your paper is written in a clear, well-organized way. If you cannot express your ideas to us in a coherent fashion, we may not be able to understand what you are saying. We will be grading these papers not only on informational content but on clarity and organization as well (So don’t just throw the information down on paper, expecting us to pick out the important parts!).
DO NOT DIRECTLY QUOTE FROM THE ARTICLES. While it’s good that you want to put things in quotations to avoid plagiarism, using large quotes from the research articles only demonstrates that you know how to copy and paste. You want to demonstrate that you understand the articles and how to think about their results, so put things in to your own words.
Try not to use “I”, even when writing about your conclusions. You can say things like, “Based on the evidence provided by each of these investigations, it seems that…” or “This pattern of results suggests that…” Even use “the present author” above “I”. It is just not good practice to write a paper in the first person in psychology.
Write in the past tense when discussing the studies. So “The subjects were all three-year olds” or “The children were tested using the Visual Cliff.”
Never say prove. You can never prove a hypothesis; you can only support
If you are discussing the procedures or results of a study. Don’t use the word article in the following way: “In this article, 60 children were tested using the Visual Cliff.” It is really in the study. The study is discussed in the article.
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