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Effects of Oxycodone on Brain Responses to Emotional Images Article Review
Mikayla Allen
1148925
PSYC-1100-YDE
Michael Moland
March 29, 2021
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Overall, I find this article to be very well written and follows many of the six principles
of thinking. There are a few criticisms I have but mainly I want to evaluate how well researched
and executed this experiment was.
Looking at falsifiability, I notice right away in the beginning of the article, the writers
admit that their predictions were incorrect and provide details on what actually occurred. The
authors write that the oxy didn’t directly affect the emotional responses to stimuli by decreasing
activity in the amygdala and increasing activity in the ventral striatum as they thought it would
(Wardle et al 1). The authors also include that instead, they saw neural activity decrease in the
right medial orbitofrontal cortex (Wardle et al 11). The authors are specific in their predictions
which creates a lot of room for falsifiability but he did not include what they thought would not
happen which would be one of my only criticisms in this area of principles of thinking. I believe
that if they had written what they thought would not happen, it would have made them seem like
better researchers.
When it comes to ruling out rival hypotheses, I find that the authors did an excellent job
in this area. They discuss a variety of potential reasons as to why activity may have decreased in
the right orbital cortex. They say the results could be from the size of the sample of participants
that could have made a small amount of positive drug effects (Wardle et al 7). They also say it
could be that the drug he used, oxy, may have not been the correct type of opiate and that other
forms of opiate could have different effects if the study were to be performed again (Wardle et al
12). They mention that they looked at other emotional regions of the brain instead of only their
predicted primary area of interest. This goes to show that the experimenters widely studied
different reasons and explanations as to why what had occurred (Wardle et al 1). They did not
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give one single hypothesis nor one single explanation but instead provided many potential
explanations.
Replicability wise, I believe the researchers provide good previous research and evidence
for his experiment before conducting it. They provide many references and reasoning for why
they conducted their experiment and why they thought opioids have a significant effect on the
brain’s emotional neural areas. They begin by writing how previous human and animal studies
suggest that opioids decrease emotional responses to negative stimuli and increase responses to
positive stimuli (Wardle et al 2). They also provide a lot of background information on opiates
and why they believe the brain will react to amygdala and ventral striatum. They write that
because of previous evidence of decreases and increases of emotional responses to specific
stimuli that he believed he would see activity in the amygdala because it reacts more strongly to
negative stimuli and the ventral striatum reacts more strongly to positive stimuli (Wardle et al 2).
On page 3, they provide supporting evidence to support his idea that opiates alter processing of
emotional stimuli (Wardle et al). I believe that providing evidence of previous research goes to
show that his findings agree with previous research in his area of study and that it makes his
research more credible. They also didn’t just provide information from only one study, but used
multiple sources to support their evidence and make their study even more credible.
I do not find many extraordinary claims in this research article. I believe that they
provided a lot of information and evidence in their claims and took many precautions during
their experiment to ensure that the data that they were collecting was as accurate as possible.
They do not claim that there’s only one reason for their findings and say it's definite, but instead
provide several different reasons and utilize words such as possibly suggesting that they could be
wrong. They also utilize various validated forms of testing such as in their standardized pictures
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and brain scans that's been verified and used by other researchers. This suggests that any claims
they are making are a lot more verifiable and that they have a lot of previous evidence to
conform their claims. Also, with the amount of previously researched studies they referred to,
the results almost all match up with their findings as well.
I find that there wasn’t much to discuss about causation vs correlation because of the way
the experiment was conducted, it’s hard to say that the oxy did not directly cause changes in the
brain. This is because during the whole experiment, the brain activity was monitored through
several different types of brain scans and only certain changes occurred after the oxy was
administered. It’s also clearly seen that in the group given the placebo didn’t show the decrease
in neural activity in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex that the group given the oxy’s saw. I
feel that it is safe to say that the oxy did directly cause the changes seen in brain activity because
those changes were not seen prior to ingesting the oxy. The authors also mentioned that they
examined the possibility of correlations between behavioral effects of OXY on picture ratings
and activity in amygdala, however there were no relationships found (Wardle et al 9). That goes
to show that the experimenters never suggested any kind of cause and effect relationships that
did not actually exist.
As for occam’s razor, I feel like the researchers were very detailed in their explanations
for each of their findings. The only point I find a little bit more vague than the rest of the article
was on page 2 when they suggested that healthy adults don’t get any kind of emotional benefits
from opiates (Wardle et al). I feel like that statement was a little bit broad and could have been
explained a bit more. They also mention that there was a change in subjective data but non in
objective data so I would’ve liked to know more about as to why that may be and to be given
possible explanations.
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Overall, I thought that the experiment was well executed and that there were very few
critiques I have over the article. They provided a sufficient amount of evidence and they had
researched their topic well before completing their experiment. They had a few hypotheses and
many possible explanations for their findings and took responsibility for their wrong predictions.
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References
Wardle, M. C., Fitzgerald, D. A., Angstadt, M., Rabinak, C. A., De Wit, H., & Phan,
L. K. (nov 2014). Effects of oxycodone on brain responses to emotional images. 231(22),
4403-15, 1-17.