Experience-Induced Fetal Plasticity - Research Paper Example

The movie chosen for this extra credit paper is “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ron Howard. It is a semi-biographical film about the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. who developed game theory used extensively in a number of practical applications like in economics, accounting, politics, military strategy, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, and computing. John Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics due to his game theory together with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi back in 1994. Like most genius people, John Nash flirted back and forth between brilliance and madness many times. He suffered from paranoid schizophrenia which is a mental illness characterized by a combination of paranoia and schizophrenia. In his case, paranoia was shown by symptoms of being persecuted by imaginary evil people; in the movie, actor Russell Crowe as John Nash is always afraid of some secret agents, primarily Soviet undercover people, who are out to get him because of his secret work about cracking some enemy military encryption code. Since he exhibited mental ailments which are largely in his mind only, the film maker made it a point to present an alternate reality which moviegoers can relate so they can understand the film. In this regard, the film presented a special problem for the script writers to make it visible. Paranoid schizophrenia has symptoms of psychosis, delusions, and hallucinations, together with claims of hearing some strange voices. In people with this severe and chronic mental disorder, the person so afflicted can exhibit both a positive (psychosis, delusion, and hallucination) and negative type of symptoms such the flat affect, very little speech, speaking in a dull monotone, and a marked lack of deriving pleasure from ordinary or usual everyday activities (NIMH 1). It is treated using second-generation anti-psychotic drugs today. Experience-induced Fetal Plasticity This peer-reviewed article was first published in the Behavioral Neuroscience back in 2007 under Vol. 121 No. 6 and was written by the team of Steven L. Youngentob et al. that was entitled “Experience-induced fetal plasticity: The effect of gestational ethanol exposure on the behavioral and neurophysiological olfactory response to ethanol odor in early postnatal and adult rats.” Their research study explored the possible relationship or correlation between early fetal exposure (intrauterine) to ethanol odor in rats results into an altered responsiveness to ethanol odor in infant and adult rats. This clinical study is actually a further exploration of a known or documented phenomenon in which human fetal ethanol exposure is strongly but not conclusively associated with ethanol avidity in human adolescence. Put simply, it means that people while still in the womb who got exposed to ethanol odor because the pregnant mother consumed alcohol tended to be at higher risk to alcohol abuse later on in their lives. The study authors conducted their laboratory experiments on rats because it is not ethical to conduct the same experiment on human fetuses. However, the significance of this study is the results on the laboratory rats can be extended to the ethanol effects on humans as there has already been documented studies before (both clinical and epidemiological) of the predictive relationship between prenatal ethanol exposure (pregnant mothers who consumed alcohol) and the higher risk for ethanol abuse in adolescent and young adult humans. So this study by Youngentob et al. is just a further exploration of previous data which strongly suggested a close relationship between olfactory function and a variety of biological processes such as reproduction, food intake, and different social behaviors (Youngentob et al. 1293). The significance of this study is illustrated by the fact that olfactory function in wombs is one of the first sense systems to develop in a fetus, whether in humans or animals. Odors in the urine, feces, or body glands help a living organism deal with its environment. In other words, there is a profound functional importance of the sense of olfaction or the sense of smell in the survival of any living organism in its environment and the study had focused on the specific experience-induced plasticity in response to odorants in the uterus of a living animal. The olfactory system of a living organism is one way by which its own survival mechanisms are enhanced because the transduction of stimuli is particularly relevant within a living animal's external environment for purposes stated earlier, such as food intake or sexual reproduction, or the avoidance of certain threats to its existence such as predators. The olfactory system is very plastic, meaning it can be formed and influenced by the early exposure to certain odors, and in this regard, even postnatal experiences (in neonates or newborns) have been influenced to a great degree by the chemosensory stimuli coming from intrauterine experiences, such as alcohol intake by the pregnant mother in humans. There are preferences formed for certain odors experienced in uteru via the mother's diet, and that such odors often result in stimulus-specific enhancement of olfactory epithelial cells. The effect of early intrauterine ethanol exposure results in a tuned or refined sense of smell that later on affects behavior and also physiological development of the fetus. Such kind of early experience (exposure to ethanol in the uterus) modulates food intake through choices and preferences for certain types of food. Both animal and human studies support the tentative conclusions regarding the retention of such ethanol-related memories in neonates and infants, especially if the exposure occured late in the gestation period, no matter how briefly. This exposure to ethanol odors paradigm helps confirm earlier literature regarding the retention of olfaction memory by a developing fetus to odor contamination in the fetal or prenatal environment and this memory is retained for a significant period of time after birth. A key finding of this study was simple fetal experience with ethanol can help to enhance its own ethanol acceptance later in life, especially in adolescence but not so much in adulthood. On the Nature of Prejudice The second article is entitled “On the nature of prejudice: Automatic and controlled processes” which first appeared in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in its issue number 33 in the year 1997. This research study was conducted by John F. Dovidio and four other authors to investigate the tricky issue of the real nature of prejudice which can be both explicit and implicit in terms of their actual manifestations such as in racial attitudes and in the race-related responses and social behaviors of people. In their study, the authors found out how the racial attitudes of people as outwardly expressed can differ significantly from their inward (or implicit) attitudes which can sometimes be surprisingly negative in nature. This social study consisted of three separate experiments done on people, in which white people were surveyed regarding their racial attitudes towards black people. In the first experiment, whites were primed to produce a response that indicated their implicit negative racial attitudes through evaluative associations with certain pictures. This is however a very significant deviance or departure from their self-reported explicit racial prejudices. What this means is that people possess substantial distinctions between explicit and implicit memory processes. Explicit memories operate in a conscious mode while implicit ones are expressed in an unconscious fashion which in turn represent past social experiences (Dovidio 511). Their second experiment replicated the first experiment and further confirmed their hypothesis how explicit measures of racial attitudes can predict, quite accurately, the so-called spontaneous responses through the use of racially-prime word completion exercises. What the finding showed is that people can differ markedly from what they actually say regarding their racial attitudes while their implicit or unconscious reactions to certain racial stimulus like the many social objects they encounter are quite the opposite to what they had professed. In other words, people claim to be not racially biased but in reality, implicit attitudes say otherwise. What this research study showed is how people can be not aware of their conscious (explicit) racial prejudices and unconscious (implicit) racial attitudes which although derived from the same general social associations (whether positive or negative) of past experiences, produce different manifestations in what they say (activation) and how they act (application). This can be partly explained by the two frameworks of aversive racism and symbolic racism. The first pertains to how modern racism is more subtle and indirect (no longer overt) in many white people who claim and endorse egalitarian values of equality but who are still actually racists because their racism is expressed in subtle and rationalizable discrimination. On the other hand, symbolic racism theory posits the idea how the racial attitudes of white people acquired early in their lives still persist into adulthood but now expressed differently in more subtle ways which make it quite difficult to detect even most racist white people are not aware of this dichotomy in their explicit and implicit racial attitudes. People in this category symbolically reject traditional racist beliefs but still exhibit anti-black feelings in more abstract social or political issues like opposition to busing or preferential treatment. The third experiment in this study merely confirmed the relative predictive validity of implicit and explicit measures of racial attitudes in actual settings where there was real or actual interaction between blacks and whites. While experiment two was able to use explicit measure to accurately predict deliberative racial responses (requiring decision making), the third experiment also proved how racial attitudes are expressed in actual situations through non-verbal behaviors exhibited by whites towards blacks, such as blinking and eye contact. What this experiment showed is how modern society still has a long way to go before racism can be totally eradicated. Many white people who claim they are not racists actually in certain situations discriminate against blacks when the norms of proper racial behavior are not clear by trying to justify or rationalize their negative responses on factors other than race. Works Cited National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). “What is Schizophrenia?” n.d. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. . Dovidio, John F., et al. “On the nature of prejudice: Automatic and controlled processes.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 33 (1997): 510-540. Print. Youngentob, Steven L., et al. “Experience-induced fetal plasticity: The effect of gestational ethanol exposure on the behavioral and neurophysiological olfactory response to ethanol odor in early postnatal and adult rats.” Behavioral Neuroscience 121.6 (2007): 1293-1305. Print. Read More