AO3 - Ultradian Rhythms

• A strength of research into ultradian rhythms is that it has practical applications in understanding age-related changes in sleep. The knowledge that growth hormone is produced during stage 4 of sleep has been associated with sleep deficit in old age, research has found older people experience less stage 4 sleep. As a result, medication and relaxation techniques have been developed to increase stage 4 sleep in older individuals and prevent some issues associated with old age like reduced alertness. Therefore, research into ultradian rhythms is an important part of applied psychology.
• However, research into ultradian rhythms may have low ecological validity. Research on ultradian rhythms is conducted in an artificial setting and so the sleep experienced by participants in these studies may not reflect their genuine sleep patterns due to the unfamiliar surroundings and because they are attached to electrodes. This may alter the length of the ultradian rhythm, making it difficult to generalise findings to explain how ultradian rhythms work in real life.
• A further strength of research into ultradian rhythms is that it uses scientific methods. This is because it uses objective and empirical techniques such as EEGs to measure brain activity. These scientifically measure the activity of the brain throughout the five stages of sleep to identify the length of the rhythm and how many times the rhythm occurs whilst excluding extraneous variables that may affect sleep such as noise and temperature. Thus this increases the overall internal validity of research investigating ultradian rhythms, therefore, raising Psychology’s scientific status.