PSYC 2600 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Behavioral Activation, Cerebral Cortex, Richard Davidson
20 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Basic assumption is that the human brain has excitatory (alert, awake, aroused) and inhibitory (sleepy, drowsy, sluggish) neural mechanisms. Balance between the two produces levels of physiological arousal at any given moment. Neural activity reflects activity of various neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, etc. ) Level of arousal fluctuates over course of day and can be changed by: environmental factors (e. g. mood music, activities (e. g. exercise, ingested chemicals (e. g. caffeine, nicotine) Arousal is regulated by the balance between excitatory and inhibitory activity, which is maintained (or regulated) by ascending reticular activation systems (aras). Too little/too much cortical arousal is unpleasant and undermines performance. Geen"s test of eysenck"s theory of extraversion this test involves extraverts and introverts do paired- associate learning task with random background noise. 1/3 of extra/introverts can adjust volume of noise. 1/3 introverts assigned to extraverts noise preferences 1/3 introverts assigned to another introverts noise preference.
