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Brain Scan Essay

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The topic of brains scans, drug use and teenagers has been of much interest to many experimenters. Drug use can be defined as continues use of alcohol, illegal drugs or the misuse of over-the-counter drugs or prescription drugs leading to negative consequences. This is done by the use of brain scans, including MRI scans; also know as magnetic resonance imaging. This type of brain scan allows scientist to see detailed images of the organs and tissues within your body by a technique that uses a magnetic field and radio waves. The magnetic field temporarily realigns hydrogen atoms in the body and is able to show brain activity. The main point of this type of study is to help predict what a teenagers drug use problem will be, if any, before it …show more content…

Just with a glance, the popular media article is one page long, briefly describing the participants, methods, and results with little detail, while the empirical is eleven pages long going into detail about the participants, methods, and results. The popular media article also uses people friendly language that could be understood by anyone, whereas the empirical article uses more scientific vocabulary that would make it harder for just anyone to understand if they had no knowledge in the field of biopsychology. For example, the popular media article says on page one, “This could mean that either the drugs suppress their brain activity or less brain activity in the reward center leads them to take drugs.” In the empirical article it states, “These findings suggest that diminished neural responses to anticipated rewards in novelty-seeking adolescents may increase vulnerability to future problematic drug use.” From reading these two sentences, the empirical article is wordier and contains phrases that most people would not understand, such as, “diminished neural responses.” They’re also different in that the empirical article had more findings with statistics then the popular media article. Another difference was the method of the study during the gathering of the neuroimaging data. For the popular media article the researchers had the participants play a “Monetary Incentive Delay Task” during the MRI scan while the empirical article had the participants to use a modified version of the Monetary Incentive Delay task (MID), which had them pressing one of two buttons. Both articles are similar in that they used one hundred and forty four adolescents. As well as the results, both articles came to the conclusion that a decrease in amount of activity in the reward center will increase the vulnerability in

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