Psychology :: essays research papers

Reaction Paper 1 (Sample Reaction Paper)Ron Gerrard, HWS Psychology divisionMy paper is based on an hold from the texts weather vane site (chapter 9) entitled Lack of stay ages bodys systems. The grassroots claim of the article is that stillness deprivation has various harmful set up on the body. The reported effects include decreased ability to metabolise glucose (similar to what occurs in diabetes) and increased levels of cortisol (a stress hormone involved in memory and regulation of blood sugar levels). The article also shortly alludes (in the quote at the bottom of page 1) to unspecified changes in soul and immune functioning with recreation deprivation. Intuitively, these results make a lot of experience to me. I know that when Im sleep deprived for round(prenominal) significant amount of time, I begin to feel naturally miser commensurate. I also seem to be more vulnerable to colds and other physical ailments. In thinking about it though, most of the times Im sl eep deprived are also periods of psychological stress (such as finals week). To the extent that there are changes in my physical well-being, Im wondering whether they are due to the sleep deprivation, the stress itself, or some combination of the two.In principle, a careful experiment should be able to isolate the effects of sleep deprivation by depriving people of sleep in the absence of stress and other such confounding variables. That seems to be what this experiment does, alone as I read the article closely, I found myself unsure that the effects it reports are necessarily due to sleep deprivation per se. I realize that a brief summary article like this does not provide all the details of the experimental methodology, but a couple of things that were reported in the article struck me as curious. The researchers studied physical functioning (cortisol levels, etc.) in men who had a everyday nights sleep (eight hours in bed) the first three nights of the study, followed by a peri od of sleep deprivation (four hours in bed) the next half-dozen nights of the study, and finally a period of sleep recovery (12 hours in bed) the uttermost seven nights of the study. In reporting the effects on the body (the word of honor of glucose metabolism, in the fifth paragraph of the article) the authors compare the sleep deprivation dress only to the sleep recovery stage, not to formula sleep. This seems to me like doing an experiment on drunkenness and comparing the drunk stage to the hangover stage, without ever reporting what happens when the person is sober.