Case Studies

• The aim of Walter Freeman's lobotomies was to detach the nerves in the frontal lobe that connected to the thalamus in order to stop mentally ill patients from experiencing heightened emotions
• Walter Freeman would use a hammer and an ice pick to enter the brain via the eye sockets and then with the ice pick, severe the nerves that led to the thalamus
• Walter Freeman used convenience sampling in which he toured around America and advertised his lobotomy to people with emotional disorders such as bipolar disorder, ADHD, anxiety and depression
• Walter Freeman concluded that the pre-frontal cortex is responsible for developing empathy, regulating impulse control, expression of personality and is responsible for the initiative to engage in creative activities
• Walter Freeman would administer his patients with electric shock until they were unconscious as an anaesthetic. He lobotomized on children under the age of 18 whose frontal lobes and hormones were undeveloped. He lobotomized on people who were unable to provide consent. His procedures lacked hygiene and basic medical science, which provided permanent physical and psychological harm to his patients
• Phineas Gage was an observational case study and the data collected was qualitative. The sampling method would have been one of convenience as Gage was available and in access to the researcher.
• Phineas Gage's case study found that specialised areas of the brain is allocated specific functions (localization). The functions of the pre-frontal cortex express personality, regulate emotions and impulse control and is responsible for planning and organisational skills. It also concluded that brain lesions cause permanent deficits in a person.
• Phineas Gage demonstrated that damage to the left frontal lobe caused a significant change in personality, difficulty with the movement of the right side of the body, difficulty with logical and analytical thinking, difficulty with completing tasks, trouble planning, easily distracted and a loss in social inhibition
• Roger Sperry's aim was to investigate the effects of hemisphere disconnection and to show that each hemisphere has different functions
• In Roger Sperry's experiment, the independent variable was; whether a person had hemisphere diconnection or whether their corpus callosum was still intact. The dependent variable was the measure of the participant's performance when trying to complete the tasks asked by the experimenter
• Roger Sperry had a dot placed in the middle of a screen and an image or word would flash in under a second to either side of the visual field. Participants were asked to identify the object or to draw it.
• Roger Sperry used convenience sampling as he possibly entered a hospital and asked for eleven split brain participants who would like to volunteer as a participant in the study
• Roger Sperry collected quantitative data.
• Roger Sperry concluded that the corpus callosum was essential in allowing information to travel between the two hemispheres. H found that hemispheric specialisation. The left hemisphere is dominant in the articulation of speech and language. The right hemisphere is dominant in visual-motor tasks and is non-verbal.
• Roger Sperry gained permission from patients to participate in the study and no psychical nor psychological harm, that we know of, was done to the patients during the experiment.