Behavioral neuroscience
[4] Behavioral neuroscientists examine the biological bases of behavior through research that involves neuroanatomical substrates, environmental and genetic factors, effects of lesions and electrical stimulation, developmental processes, recording electrical activity, neurotransmitters, hormonal influences, chemical components, and the effects of drugs.
Descartes suggested that the pineal gland, a midline unpaired structure in the brain of many organisms, was the point of contact between mind and body.
The influential work of Claude Bernard, Charles Bell, and William Harvey helped to convince the scientific community that reliable data could be obtained from living subjects.
The author of the journal at the time gave reasoning for this separation, with one being that behavioral neuroscience is the broader contemporary advancement of physiological psychology.
[38] Computational methods have a wide variety of roles including clarifying experiments, hypothesis testing and generating new insights.
Neural tissue destroyed as a primary consequence of a surgery, electric shock or neurotoxin can confound the results so that the physical trauma masks changes in the fundamental neurophysiological processes of interest.
For example, when using an electrolytic probe to create a purposeful lesion in a distinct region of the rat brain, surrounding tissue can be affected: so, a change in behavior exhibited by the experimental group post-surgery is to some degree a result of damage to surrounding neural tissue, rather than by a lesion of a distinct brain region.
[41] Pharmacological manipulations also allow blocking of certain neurotransmitters temporarily as the function returns to its previous state after the drug has been metabolized.
As a result, the bulk of literature in behavioral neuroscience deals with experiences and mental processes that are shared across different animal models such as: However, with increasing technical sophistication and with the development of more precise noninvasive methods that can be applied to human subjects, behavioral neuroscientists are beginning to contribute to other classical topic areas of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, such as: Behavioral neuroscience has also had a strong history of contributing to the understanding of medical disorders, including those that fall under the purview of clinical psychology and biological psychopathology (also known as abnormal psychology).
Although animal models do not exist for all mental illnesses, the field has contributed important therapeutic data on a variety of conditions, including: Behavioral neuroscientists conduct research on various cognitive processes through the use of different neuroimaging techniques.
Examples of cognitive research might involve examination of neural correlates during emotional information processing, such as one study that analyzed the relationship between subjective affect and neural reactivity during sustained processing of positive (savoring) and negative (rumination) emotion.
fMRI data showed similar activations in brain regions during both rumination and savoring, suggesting shared neural mechanisms between the two types of repetitive thinking.
The results of the study suggest there are similarities, both subjectively and mechanistically, with repetitive thinking about positive and negative emotions.
This overall suggests shared neural mechanisms by which sustained emotional processing of both positive and negative information occurs.
[43] Research within the field of behavioral neuroscience involves looking at the complex neuroanatomy underlying different emotional processes, such as stress.
Overall, the article provides a comprehensive scientific overview of stress through a neurobiological lens, highlighting the importance of our current knowledge in stress-related research areas today.
