The purpose of this paper is to investigate the contributions of the DRD4 gene on personality and motivational development, and how social support may moderate this association.
Language processing involves many different brain functions. An aspect of language is word concepts, which are stored and accessed separately from another aspect of language, the visual and auditory store of the word. Homonyms allow us to understand how these systems are set up better by giving us access to an individual word with more than one word concept. By employing studies that deal with homonym function, we are able to see homonym processing as a function of time, and by employing fMRI imaging, we are able to understand what types of processes the brain undergoes in comprehending a homonym as compared to a word with one sole meaning.
Attempts at quitting drinking for an alcoholic can be a substantial and lifelong hurdle, with relapse rates are as high as 80-95% in the year following an intervention (Hendershot, Witkiewitz, George, & Marlatt, 2011). There are three known cues that lead to relapse: consumption of a small amount of alcohol, cues that are associated with prior availability of alcohol, and stress (Hansson et al., 2006). A look at genes implicated in relapse can be an important step in creating efficacious individualized intervention treatment programs. In this review, two types of genes are inspected regarding their effects on alcohol relapse; those that involve the dopamine reward system as well as CRHR1, a gene that has been linked to stressful drinking of alcohol.
This paper offers an inspection of the similarities and differences in music and language processing. Evidence from multiple studies are utilized in an attempt to discern how entwined they are within the realm of neurological processing. While there are significant areas of overlap, points of divergence help to distinguish the order in which the brain processes the two auditory streams, and may also help in implicating which process was established first. This paper was written for a cognitive neuroscience course in 2011, though minor grammatical adjustments were made before posting on academese.com in 2013.