Author: tuh547

Many students, including myself, struggle with test anxiety throughout their educational careers. In class, we learned that anxiety is having feelings of excessive or unrealistic anxiety or fearfulness about either future events or the current environment you’re in and the stimuli that is present. There are different types of anxiety that a person could have, usually regarding how long their bursts of anxiety lasts for. Test anxiety is mainly getting fearful and anxious about a future event (which is the test). After doing some research on this topic, there are some biological causes. For example, before and during an exam, the body releases the hormone adrenaline to help the body prepare for what is about to happen, which is also known as the fight or flight response. In the past, in PSYCH 100, we have learned that this response is a part of the autonomic nervous system, more specifically the sympathetic nervous system. This response either prepares you to deal with the high stress you’re experiencing or to flee the situation entirely. The fight or flight response helps you deal with the stressful situation so you are prepared and alert. Some symptoms that people with test anxiety can have are nausea, sweating, and shaking body parts. In addition to the biological causes listed, there are also mental causes, such as student expectations. For example if the student believes they will do poorly on the exam, that will most likely increase their test anxiety when it comes time to take the test or if they experienced anxiety for one test, they become fearful that the anxiety may reoccur for future tests, which increases their anxiety by just thinking about the future. While continuing my research on test anxiety, I found a few basic tips to help minimize test anxiety in individuals. The main tip is to make sure you are prepared for the exam and space out your studying over a long period of time so you feel comfortable with all the material, as we were also taught in PSYCH 100. One major aspect to focus on, is eliminating the negative thoughts about the test, because if you continue to have negative thoughts and associate anxiety ridden feelings with testing, the anxiety will persist for every exam you will take in the future. When people always associate negative thoughts and feelings with exams, they will most likely acquire a learned helplessness state of mind. Learned helplessness is when people feel that they have no control over their situation, they may begin to behave in a helpless manner and it could lead to anxiety because you feel as though you cannot change what you’re going through. Sleep and meditation can also help to calm the nerves before an exam.

Work Cited: Cherry, Kendra. “What Causes Test Anxiety and Academic Stress.” Verywell Mind, Verywell Mind, 12 Aug. 2019, www.verywellmind.com/what-causes-test-anxiety-2795366.

For the past few weeks, during class we have covered a great deal of information about memory. Including different types of memory, how memories are made, short-term and long-term memory, how memories change, and where memories are made in the brain. We discussed that memories are made in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a neural center in the limbic system that processes explicit memories. The limbic system is associated with motivation, sex drive, emotion, and memory. In class, we did not go too into depth on the hippocampus, and after researching it, it is responsible for the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory. Then I started to wonder what exactly would happen if it were damaged and obviously I could conclude that memory would be effected, I was just unsure how dramatically it would be effected. If a person was in an accident and they were injured or experienced TBI (traumatic brain injury), and the hippocampus was specifically damaged, they would experience a loss of memory and a loss of the ability to make new, long-term memories. In severe cases, damage to this area could also result in the illness known as Alzheimer’s disease which results in dementia, and that is the degenerating of brain cells and the decline of memory, thinking, behavioral skills, and social skills over time. I have also found that in cases with depression, atrophy has also occurred to the hippocampus, which does not allow a healthy range of emotions and to regulate those emotions in a normal way. In addition to this, when the hippocampus shrinks due to depression and other mental illnesses, it leads to an interference with creating new memories. As it is evident to conclude, when the hippocampus is injured or damaged, it can lead to life altering changes in one’s mind and lifestyle. It can completely change the way one thinks, recalls memories, and if they have Alzheimer’s, they become almost totally dependent on others. I then researched if there are any ways that the hippocampus can be repaired and for the memory loss for people with Alzheimer’s, there is not a cure, but the memory loss can be slowed down with the help of medication. When there is damage to it, there is not one  certain thing that can be done to fix it completely but it can regenerate to a certain degree. It has been found that abstinence from alcohol could reverse hippocampal damage within 6 to 12 months. For people with depression, antidepressants have been found to help with producing new brain cells and to rebuild the hippocampus in individuals with depression. Although there is no definite fix, there are  many preventative options such as, physical exercise, stress management, and mental exercises to live a healthy lifestyle and keep the hippocampus active and to keep our memory intact.

Sources:

• Dresden, Danielle. “Hippocampus: Function, Size, and Problems.” Medical News Today, MediLexicon International, 7 Dec. 2017, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313295.php.
• Kvarnstrom, Elisabet. “Depression, Damage, and Regeneration: The Effects of Hippocampal Atrophy.” Bridges to Recovery, Bridges to Recovery, 10 Apr. 2019, www.bridgestorecovery.com/blog/depression-damage-and-regeneration-the-effects-of-hippocampal-atrophy/.
• Nasrallah, Henry A. “Remember the Hippocampus!: You Can Protect the Brain’s ‘Regeneration Center’.” MDedge Psychiatry, 16 Apr. 2018, www.mdedge.com/psychiatry/article/62883/remember-hippocampus-you-can-protect-brains-regeneration-center.

I am majoring in speech language pathology and in the future, I would love to work with children and adults with autism as a speech therapist. My nephew has autism and it fascinates me to observe how his brain works, his behaviors, his speech, and his way of life. In order to understand how a brain of a person with autism operates, it would be best to focus in and study the neurotransmitters of that human. Neurotransmitters are chemical substances are released at the end of a nerve and sends an impulse which diffuses across the synapse which then causes the transfer of the impulses to other nerves. After doing research, I found that Glutamate is the main excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain and GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. Research states that an imbalance in synaptic excitation and inhibition is observed to be an addition onto the diseased physiology of autism spectrum disorder. As most know, people with autism have a tendency of being less communicative, have less eye contact, and they have a harder time expressing their emotions or feelings. Oxytocin is a hormone that is responsible for social bonding, sexual reproduction, childbirth, and the period after childbirth. The hormone usually has pro-social effects on a human. Research has shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin has been implicated to autism. This is a logical stance because social impairments are closely linked to autism spectrum disorder and they lack having social bonding and attachment during childhood and soon after (Neurotransmitters). It has also been found that there is a link between neurotransmitter imbalance and brain connectivity between the two regions of the brain. The imbalance and the lack to communication between the regions plays a role in social communication and language in people autism (Staff).  Therefore, it is evident to see that there is a relation between the neurotransmitters and the brains of people with autism spectrum disorder and it is due to the imbalance of neurotransmitters and the communication loss among regions in the brain. I find this interesting because knowing that I will be working with children with autism in the future, it is helpful to know a little about what the neuroscience is behind why they behave and operate in the manner that they do.

Works Cited:

• • “Neurotransmitters: Spectrum: Autism Research News.” Spectrum, www.spectrumnews.org/wiki/neurotransmitters/.
  • Staff, Science X. “Link Found between Neurotransmitter Imbalance, Brain Connectivity in Those with Autism.” Medical Xpress – Medical Research Advances and Health News, Medical Xpress, 6 June 2018, medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-link-neurotransmitter-imbalance-brain-autism.html.