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Outline And Evaluate Research Into The Influence Of Sex Differences In Biological Psychology

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There are many approaches within psychology that study the influence of sex differences in human behaviours such as, behavioural, cognitive and biological approaches. There are many factors within each approach that contribute and influence the development of sex differences in human behaviours. Within biological psychology, there are many factors that combine to influence the difference between the sexes, such as genetics and hormones and brain structure and function. Research methods used by biological psychologists to investigate these differences involve methods such as animal and case studies, drug therapy, twin studies and scans (MRI, PET, CAT). Although there are many different approaches to studying sex differences, within each approach, …show more content…

(Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen, and Raggatt, 2002), conducted a study to investigate whether eye contact in 12-month-old children was related to prenatal testosterone level. The aims of the study were to see if there were sex differences in the amount of eye contact made by the child and the child's foetal testosterone level. For the study, the amount of eye contact made between 70 children and one of their parents was observed. The results observed in this study showed that girls made more eye contact than the boys did with the parent, this supports other research that girls are more sociable than boys (Cahill & Maccoby, 1999). The results also suggested that foetal testosterone may shape the mechanisms that are underlying in social behaviour. (Lutchmaya, Baron-Cohen, and Raggatt, 2002) The study showed a significant relationship between lack of eye contact in males and high levels of foetal testosterone, as the testosterone level increased, eye contact decreased. There was no significant relationship found between eye contact and foetal testosterone levels among the female children in the study. The findings from this study have been able to support earlier findings that sex differences are present in early age development, the study has also demonstrated that the amount of eye contact does vary with levels of foetal testosterone for both …show more content…

The research that has been conducted so far from biology psychologists has shown that many of the functions in the body such as sex hormones and the brains structure and function can affect human behaviour. Studies into the sex differences in behaviour from a biological perspective have also shown a relationship between genetics and human behaviour.
Although there are significant studies showing the contributions of biology-psychology to the understanding of sex differences in behaviour. Previous studies in this field have also highlighted the contributions made to sex differences in human behaviour from other approaches such as behavioural, cultural and social. These other factors have been shown to contribute just as much to the sex difference in behaviour such as social and environmental explanations (Weissman,

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