Part of The Student Room Group

  • Join over 1.2 million students every month
  • Accelerate your learning by 29%
  • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month

Hormones and Heredity

Extracts from this document...

Introduction

Checkpoint: Heredity and Hormones The influence on heredity and hormones play a major role on a person's behavior. Traits are passed from generation to generation, and though upbringing and environment allow for some modifications in how those genes may or may not be expressed, the traits have already predetermined some things. Hormones have been identified as having noticeable control of physical and mental processes as well. Hormones are of significant importance. Hormones are your body's chemical messengers. They travel in your bloodstream to tissues or organs. They work slowly, over time, and affect many different processes, including: growth and development, metabolism, sexual function, reproduction and mood (Medline Plus, 2010). Hormones are powerful and it only takes a tiny amount to cause big changes in cells or even your whole body. Endocrine glands, which are special groups of cells, make hormones. The major endocrine glands are the thyroid, pineal, pituitary, adrenal glands and pancreas. In addition, men produce hormones in their testes and women produce them in their ovaries (Medline Plus, 2010). The thyroid gland produces thyroxin which is the hormone responsible for regulating metabolism which plays a part in how much energy one has at a particular time. ...read more.

Middle

Both of these conditions affect the kidneys. Diabetes insipidus is different from the more well-known diabetes mellitus (including type 1 and type 2 diabetes), which affects the levels of glucose in our bodies. The last two hormones secreted by the pituitary are Luteinizing hormone (LH) which regulates testosterone in men and estrogen in women and Follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) which promotes sperm production in men and stimulates the ovaries to enable ovulation in women. Luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone work together to cause normal function of the ovaries and testes (The Hormone Foundation, 2010). The adrenal gland is responsible for a person's reaction to stress, releasing hormones that you can't live without, including sex hormones and cortisol, which helps you respond to stress and has many other functions. During periods of stress the brain signals the adrenal glands to produce epinephrine or "adrenaline". Epinephrine increases the rate in which the heart beats. The increased cardiac output supplies more oxygen to the muscles, putting the body in a heightened state to react. As a longer term response to stress, cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands, promoting the release of energy (Medline Plus, 2010). ...read more.

Conclusion

The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind (Center for Evolutionary Psychology, 2009.) Evolutionary psychologists see the mind as being "hardwired" and that humans are predisposed to think and act a certain way (Morris & Maisto, 2005). They also contend that these predispositioned behaviors evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago. By studying things like language, parenting, happiness, sexual attraction, and violence and by studying these things in different times, habitats, cultures and among the sexes evolutionary psychologists seek to understand the basic programs that guide thinking and behavior (Morris & Maisto, 2005). The factors that influence behavior are hormones, genetics, and environment. Of these factors, we can only control one of the three. Environment is a controllable variable while heredity and hormones are not. Though evolutionary psychology argues that environment and evolution have predetermined our behavior, genetics tends to disagree. Behavior genetics shows us that genes and the physical process of the body's hormones can have a significant effect on mood and behavior. Somewhere is the middle is probably a common ground where all three contribute to our behavior. ...read more.

The above preview is unformatted text

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our University Degree Behavioural Science section.

Found what you're looking for?

  • Start learning 29% faster today
  • 150,000+ documents available
  • Just £6.99 a month

or


Not the one? Search for your essay title...
  • Join over 1.2 million students every month
  • Accelerate your learning by 29%
  • Unlimited access from just £6.99 per month

See related essaysSee related essays

Related University Degree Behavioural Science essays

  1. the effect of a coloured letter in a word or non word on the ...

    It was predicted that if the congruent trials was replaced with non word controls, the semantic processing by the Stroop effect would have a bigger result difference between the single letter and whole word. The results itself had proved that the prediction is true and that Besner argues that automaticity was not the cause for the Stroop effect.

  2. Law and ethics in nursing

    This statement structures the basis on which duty of care is formed and suggests that a duty of care exists when it is reasonably foreseeable that a persons action may cause harm to another person (Dimond 2005). This is an important statement for nurses to consider as by the sense

  1. Preventative Intervention for Alcohol Abuse among College Students

    A major area in which I believe study A excelled is that the LMC was much more personal and connecting with its participants than its counterpart of study B which was getting its results by mail and phone interviews. Finally, the mandatory training for the leaders in study A was

  2. How does attachment influence the social and emotional development of the child? In your ...

    development of affectional response, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance," Harlow explained (Harlow, 1958, 13, 673-685). Harlow's experiments offered irrefutable proof that a child seeks love and a bond. In order to encourage a bond between the child and caregiver, social workers in Belarus recommend a 'lock-down' approach within a house with which a child is adopted into.

  1. Clinicians have ethical codes, should scientists have them too?

    There are many disparities within various governmental policies, no greater evidenced that within the Bush Administration's severe reluctance to fund stem cell research and thus by creating a code, which would act as a mediating international reference point, there would at least be some hope of influencing governmental decisions8,9.

  2. The Vulnerable Population of Alcoholics

    Walker (2002) discusses how there are multiple roles that family members may adopt when a parent is an alcoholic. These roles are identified as the caretaker, hero, scapegoat, mascot/cheerleader and lost child. The caretaker role is usually taken on by the parent not suffering from alcoholism but can be placed taken on be a child in worse type of circumstances.

  1. Stressors and coping mechanisms: a variation in gender, adolescence and ethnic identity.

    Outer-directed coping strategies on the other hand are aimed at changing the current situation or the behaviours of others (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Empirical evidence proposes that problem-focused coping is related to reduced levels of psychological symptoms (wills, 1986), unlike emotion focused-coping, which is related to increased levels of symptoms (Compas, Malcarne and Fondacaro, 1988)

  2. Critically discuss the theoretical explanations put forward to explain alcohol dependence and discuss the ...

    An intervention is a way of coming in between the person and their behaviour. Current thinking in the field of addiction is that "Brief Intervention Strategies" have a more beneficial and cost effective outcome than periods of hospitalisation. (Bien et al 1993)

  • Over 160,000 pieces
    of student written work
  • Annotated by
    experienced teachers
  • Ideas and feedback to
    improve your own work