The hypothesis given explores the role of the amygdala when it comes to ability to express and evaluate facial expressions of emotion. It specifically speaks to if the amygdala is damaged and how that could affect the ability to express and evaluate facial expressions of emotion. They studied a woman who is referred to as S.P. throughout the article. She had a number of procedures two being the removal of her right amygdala as well as had two biopsies in the left amygdala. Other participants in this study consisted of twenty subjects who were of similar age and education level. The twenty control subjects were measured on facial affect evaluation, lexical affect identification, and facial affect generation, as well as subject S.P.. Performance of S. P. was compared to the control subject’s performance. As I mentioned above both S.P. and the twenty control subjects were all measured on facial affect evaluation, lexical affect identification, and facial affect generation. Facial affect evaluation consisted of all subjects being given a facial expression term (e.g., afraid, angry, disgusted, happy, sad, and surprised), once given a term they were showed a facial expression and asked to rate on a scale …show more content…
and the twenty control subjects. For the facial affect evaluation S.P. was very compromised in her judgment of fear, as well as other emotions. The compromised emotion, fear can conservatively be said to have been caused somewhat by the lesions of her amygdala. S.P. results for the lexical affect identification task showed within normal range for all emotions. For the facial affect generation task S.P. results showed no significant difference between her results and the control group results. All in All the findings showed that amount of damage to S.P. bilateral amygdalar was enough to show impairments in evaluation of the expressions of fear, this finding is also true of other studies
...ide the limbic system, which indicate that psychopaths use non-limbic, cognitive strategies to process affective stimuli. The third study discovered significant reduced activation for fearful faces in areas responsible for processing facial emotion in psychopaths. Also, psychopathic individuals displayed reduced visual cortical activation when being exposed to both fearful and happy faces, suggesting that the neural underpinnings for processing happy facial expressions are intact in psychopathic individuals, but are less responsive regular individuals. Abnormal facial emotion recognition processing leads to violent, inappropriate, and less empathic behavior. While the etiology of this disorder is still unknown, these experiments have constructed a foundation for future research to uncover more about the abnormalities lying within the psychopathic brain.
Several functional imaging studies using both testing paradigms illustrate this dysfunction. When participants with PTSD were shown fearful faces in a cognitive activation paradigm, there was a corresponding increase in cBRF using fMRI, indicating hyper-responsiveness of the amydgala to threat-related stimuli (Bryant et al., 2008). Liberzon et al. (1999) also measured cBRF in Vietnam veterans with PTSD using SPECT during a symptom provocation paradigm of combat-related sounds. The results revealed exclusive activation of the left amygdala and nucleus accumbens in PTSD patients and not in combat controls and normal
Hess, U., & Thibault, P. (2009). Darwin and Emotion Expression. American Psychologist, 2, 120-124. doi:10.1037/a0013386
In other words, Henry cannot encode and compose short-term memory, and recall long-term memory of his past experience. Additionally, Henry’s amygdala has also been removed from this surgery, which caused him to learn fear from daily life and remember some unpleasant events. Therefore, Henry always expresses happiness more than sad and unhappy emotions. It is an interesting finding that amygdala is associated with fear memory and emotional expression. Henry Gustav died in 2008.
The focus of this literature review is on the patterns of amygdala activation and its role in attentional threat assessment, as well the effects of the neuropeptide oxytocin on the amygdala. The amygdala plays an important role in human threat assessment. In both humans and primates, the identification of facial expressions and their direction of gaze is a necessary aspect of social behavior, and the amygdala plays a large role in this function (Boll, Gamer, Kalisch, & Buchel, 2011, p. 299). From a medical standpoint, the study of the amygdala would help in understanding the neurological basis of many behavior disorders such as borderline personality disorder and post traumatic stress disorder. These studies make use of novel techniques with a combination of functional MRI and eye tracking based face perception tasks. More recent studies have involved more precise imaging in order to observe specific regions of the amygdala, rather than the amygdala as a whole structure. The amygdala is strongly influenced by fearful and angry faces, which stimulate feelings of threat. The amygdala also exhibits differential activation in different sexes, thus having extensive implications on tailoring drugs for mood disorders in the different sexes (Lischke et al., 2012, p. 1432).
Sight cues came as no surprise to me, as I had assumed since the start that those would be the most prevalent. What was surprising to me was that I had a memory cued by a memory. Although I did not think it impossible, I had assumed that such a cue would not happen to me. I also noted the pattern of influence on my emotional state. Five memories influenced me positively, one negatively, and six did not influence me at all. The emotional content of the memories lined up about the same as the influence it had on my emotional state. The only part that came as a surprise to me was that some of my memories had no emotional content. I had assumed that all of the memories I would write down would have emotion to them and influence my emotion in some way. All of the memories I recorded were dealing with unusual events in my life, which suggests there is no correlation between my emotion and the unusualness of the memory. I found this interesting, as I thought the purpose of most of my involuntary memories would be of things I do often and that is why they would be remembered out of the blue. Based on what I recorded, the purpose of my involuntary memories seems to be to make sure I remember things I do not think about that
Kiehl’s (2006) literature review continues with this idea of amygdala implication in psychopathic traits by saying that the amygdala, in particular o...
Amygdala: It is two oval shaped masses of neurons involved in emotional responses. The amygdala is vital to your ability to feel certain emotions such as fear and ...
LeDoux, J. (1998). The emotional brain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Chapter 4 will go on LN).
The simple psycho-galvanometer was one of the earliest tools of psychological research. A psycho-galvanometer measures the resistance of the skin to the passage of a very small electric current. It has been known for decades that the magnitude of this electrical resistance is affected, not only by the subject's general mood, but also by immediate emotional reactions. Although these facts have been known for over a hundred years and the first paper to be presented on the subject of the psycho-galvanometer was written by Tarchanoff in 1890, it has only been within the last 25 years that the underlying causes of this change in skin resistance have been discovered.
Most of the body’s functions such as, thinking, emotions, memories and so forth are controlled by the brain. It serves as a central nervous system in the human body. The mind is the intellect/consciousness that originates in the human brain and manifests itself in emotions, thoughts, perceptions and so forth. This means that the brain is the key interpreter of the mind’s content. Jackson and Nagel seem to resist identifying what we call “mental events” with brain events, for different reasons, while J.J.C. Smart takes the opposing view.
One famous pioneer in this area is Ekman (1973 in Shiraev & Levy, 2007, 2004) who classified six basic facial expressions as being universal and reflecting most emotional states. They are happy, sad, anger, disgust, surprised and fearful. Ekman (1973) proposed that the universality of emotions allows individuals to empathise with others and enables us to read other’s feelings therefore emotions must serve an adaptive purpose hence supporting the claim that they are universal (Darwin, 1972 in John, Ype, Poortinga, Marshall & Pierre 2002). Moreover, emotions are widely accepted to accompany...
‘An adequate hypothesis of fear must utilize physiological concepts of cerebral action in addition to psychological terminology. The hypothesis proposes that "fear originates in the disruption of temporally and spatially organized cerebral activities; that fear are distinct from other emotions by the nature of the processes tending to restore equilibrium." The sources of fear involve conflict, sensory deficit, or constitutional change. ‘
3). By drawing on more advanced biological knowledge of the brain’s activities in different areas, Storbeck and Clore (2007) concluded that the visual cortex could actually identify subliminal stimuli (which is regarded as a kind of cognitive activities) without its being consciously aware of by the subject. The only difference between a conscious and unconscious cognitive processing, they argued, was the strength of firing of the neurons which determined whether such information entered the subject’s consciousness, and leading to a more confident identification of the stimuli. Hence an unconscious processing doesn’t rule out cognitive activities and implies a preferential processing of affective components. Furthermore, they argued that amygdala was not the essential part in the mere exposure effect by citing the case of a patient GY whose amygdala has been severed from his visual cortex (Greve & Bauer, 1990) yet who was still shown to have the mere exposure effect. Therefore, they concluded that emotion and cognition should be treated as interdependent faculties functioning alongside with each other. This advocate was supported by a later meta-analytical review of the brain basis of emotion (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett,
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory