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Exogenous Zeitgebers - Coggle Diagram
Exogenous Zeitgebers
Evaluation
Strength
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Example
- Siffre carried out an isolation study in which he spent 6 months in a cave with no external cues (EZs).
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This shows that although sleep/wake cycles are mainly controlled by Eps, EZs are essential to synchronise our body rhythms to the 24-hour day.
Strength
Key Research to support the role of exogenous zeitgebers in controlling our biological rhythms comes from Campbell and Murphy (1998).
For example
Campbell and Murphy 1998
- They monitored the body temperatures of 15 volunteers who slept in a laboratory.
- They introduced light to the during the night at a series of intervals by shining a beam of light onto the back of their knees. - They were woken at different times and a light pad was shone on the back of their knees.
- The participant’s circadian rhythms were disrupted by up to three hours.
This shows that it is not necessary for light just to enter the eyes to have a physiological effect on biological rhythms and shows the EZ do have an effect on our biological rhythms
Limitation
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For example
The behaviourist approach would suggest that bodily rhythms are influenced by other people and social norms, i.e. sleep occurs when it is dark because that is the social norm and it wouldn’t be socially acceptable for a person to conduct their daily routines during the night.
The research discussed here could be criticised for being reductionist as it only considers a singular biological mechanism and fails to consider the other widely divergent viewpoints.
A01
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Their role
It is to entrain the otherwise free-running biological rhythms to keep the individual in synchron with the external world
For example
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Therefore…
Daylight resets the biological clock SCN at the beginning of every day. This happened because bright light suppresses the reduction of melatonin temperature and scal cues also act as EZs.
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